Once the building had been a haven for men of power and wealth, and well-advanced into middle age.
Now it teemed with mothers and children, with old people playing checkers or chess or dreaming, with younger adults taking dancing lessons or bowling on the duckpin alleys, or playing the pinball machines.
I had to laugh.
Chapter 38
IT was on that particular visit to Manhattan that
I saw my first “Thirteen Club” There were dozens of such raffish establishments in Chicago, I had heard. Now Manhattan had one of it’s own.
Eliza and I had not anticipated that all the people with “13” in their middle names would naturally band together almost immediately, to form the largest family of all.
And I certainly got a taste of my own medicine when I asked a guard on the door of the Manhattan Thirteen Club if I could come in and have a look around. It was very dark in there.
“All due respect, Mr. President,” he said to me, “but are you a Thirteen, sir?”
“No,” I said. “You know I’m not.”
“Then I must say to you, sir,” he said, “what I have to say to you.
“With all possible respect, sir:” he said, “Why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling dughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?”
I was in ecstasy.
Yes, and it was during that visit here that I first learned of The Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped – then a tiny cult in Chicago, but destined to become the most popular American religion of all time.
It was brought to my attention by a-leaflet handed to me by a clean and radiant youth, as I crossed the lobby to the staircase of my hotel.
He was jerking his head around in what then seemed an eccentric manner, as though hoping to catch someone peering out at him from behind a potted palm tree or an easy chair, or even from directly overhead, from the crystal chandelier.
He was so absorbed in firing ardent glances this way and that, that it was wholly uninteresting to him that he had just handed a leaflet to the President of the United States.
“May I ask what you’re looking for, young man?” I said.
“For our Saviour, sir,” he replied.
“You think He’s in this hotel?” I said.
“Read the leaflet, sir,” he said.
So I did – in my lonely room, with the radio on.
At the very top of the leaflet was a primitive picture of Jesus, standing and with His Body facing forward, but with His Face in profile – like a one-eyed jack in a deck of playing cards.
He was gagged. He was handcuffed. One ankle was shackled and chained to a ring fixed to the floor. There was a single perfect tear dangling from the lower lid of His Eye.
Beneath the picture was a series of questions and answers, which went as follows:
QUESTION: What is your name?
ANSWER: I am the Right Reverend William Uranium-8 Wainwright, Founder of the Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped at 3972 Ellis Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.
QUESTION: When will God send us His Son again?
ANSWER: He already has. Jesus is here among us.
QUESTION: Why haven’t we seen or heard anything about Him?
ANSWER: He has been kidnapped by the Forces of Evil.
QUESTION: What must we do?
ANSWER: We must drop whatever we are doing, and spend every waking hour in trying to find Him. If we do not, Cod will exercise His Option.
QUESTION: What is God’s Option?
ANSWER: He can destroy Mankind so easily, any time he chooses to.
Hi ho.
I saw the young man eating alone in the diningroom that night I marvelled that he could jerk his head around and still eat without spilling a drop. He even looked under his plate and water glass for Jesus not once, but over and over again.
I had to laugh.
Chapter 39
BUT then, just when everything was going so
well, when Americans were happier than they had ever been, even though the country was bankrupt and falling apart, people began to die by the millions of “The Albanian Flu” in most places, and here on Manhattan of “The Green Death.”
And that was the end of the Nation. It became families, and nothing more.
Hi Ho.
Oh, there were claims of Dukedoms and Kingdoms and such garbage, and armies were raised and forts were built here and there. But few people admired them. They were just more bad weather and more bad gravity that families endured from time to time.
And somewhere in there a night of actual bad gravity crumbled the foundations of Machu Picchu. The condominiums and boutiques and banks and gold bricks and jewelry and pre-Columbian art collections and the Opera House and the churches, and all that, eloped down the Andes, wound up in the sea.
I cried.
And families painted pictures everywhere of the kidnapped Jesus Christ.
People continued to send news to us at the White House for a little while. We ourselves were experiencing death and death and death, and expecting to die.
Our personal hygiene deteriorated quickly. We stopped bathing and brushing our teeth regularly. The males grew beards, and let their hair grow down to their shoulders.
We began to cannibalize the White House almost absent-mindedly, burning furniture and bannisters and paneling and picture frames and so on in the fireplaces, to keep warm.
Hortense Muskelhunge-13 McBundy, my personal secretary, died of flu. My valet, Edward Strawberry-4 Kleindienst, died of flu. My Vice-President, Mildred Helium-20 Theodorides, died of flu.
My science advisor, Dr. Albert Aquamarine-1 Piatigorsky, actually expired in my arms on the floor of the Oval Office.
He was almost as tall as I was. We must have been quite a sight on the floor.
“What does it all mean?” he said over and over again.
“I don’t know, Albert,” I said. “And maybe I’m glad I don’t know.”
“Ask a Chinaman!” he said, and he went to his reward, as the saying goes.
Now and then the telephone would ring. It became such a rare occurrence that I took to answering it personally.
“This is your President speaking,” I would say. As like as not, I would find myself talking over a tenuous, crackling circuit to some sort of mythological creature – “The King of Michigan,” perhaps, or “The Emergency Governor of Florida,” or “The Acting Mayor of Birmingham,” or some such thing.
But there were fewer messages with each passing week. At last there were none.
I was forgotten.
Thus did my Presidency end – two thirds of the way through my second term.
And something else crucial was petering out almost as quickly – which was my irreplaceable supply of tri-benzo-Deportamil.
Hi ho.
I dared not count my remaining pills until I could not help but count them, they were so few. I had become so dependent upon them, so grateful for them, that it seemed to me that my life would end when the last one was gone.
I was running out of employees, too. I was soon down to one. Everybody else had died or wandered away, since there weren’t any messages any more.
The one person who remained with me was my brother, was faithful Carlos Daffodil-11 Villavicencio, the dishwasher I had embraced on my first day as a Daffodil
Chapter 40
BECAUSE everything had dwindled so
quickly, and because there was no one to behave sanely for any more, I developed a mania for counting things. I counted slats in Venetian blinds. I counted the knives and forks and spoons in the kitchen. I counted the tufts of the coverlet on Abraham Lincoln’s bed.
And I was counting posts in a bannister one day, on my hands and knees on the staircase, although the gravity was medium-to-light. And then I realized that a man was watching me from below.
He was dressed in buckskins and moccasins and a coon-skin hat, and carried a rifle.
“My God, President Daffodil,” I said to myself, “you’ve really gone crazy this time. That’s ol’ Daniel Boone down there.”
And then another man joined the first one. He was dressed like a military pilot back in the days, long before I was President, when there had been such a thing as a United States Air Force.
“Let me guess:” I said out loud, “It’s either Halloween or the Fourth of July.”
The pilot seemed to be shocked by the condition of the White House. “What’s happened here?” he said.
“All I can tell you,” I said, “is that history has been made.”
“This is terrible,” he said.
“If you think this is bad,” I told him, and I tapped my forehead with my fingertips, “you should see what it looks like in here.”
Neither one of them even suspected that I was the President. I had become quite a mess by then.