And he was right to give those people with pens and paper that archaic title. Most of his soldiers could scarcely read or write.
Captain O’Hare and I landed on the manicured lawn before the King’s Summer Palace, which had been a private military academy at one time. Soldiers, who had behaved badly in the recent battle, I suppose, were on their knees everywhere, guarded by military policemen. They were cutting grass with bayonets and pocket knives and scissors – as a punishment.
Captain O’Hare and I entered the palace between two lines of soldiers. They were an honor guard of some sort, I suppose. Each one held aloft a banner, which was embroidered with the totem of his artificial extended family – an apple, an alligator, the chemical symbol for lithium, and so on.
It was such a comically trite historical situation, I thought. Aside from battles, the history of nations seemed to consist of nothing but powerless old poops like myself, heavily medicated and vaguely beloved in the long ago, coming to kiss the boots of young psychopaths.
Inside myself, I had to laugh.
I was ushered alone into the King’s spartan private quarters. It was a huge room, where the military academy must have held dances at one time. Now there was only a folding cot in there, a long table covered with maps, and a stack of folding chairs against one wall.
The King himself sat at the map table, ostentatiously reading a book, which turned out to be Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.
Behind him, standing, were three male scribes – with pencils and pads.
There was no place for me or anyone else to sit.
I positioned myself before him, my mouldy Homburg in hand. He did not look up from his book immediately, although the doorkeeper had certainly announced me loudly enough.
“Your Majesty,” the doorkeeper had said, “Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, the President of the United States!!”
He looked up at last, and I was amused to see that he was the spit and image of his grandfather, Dr. Stewart Rawlings Mott, the physician who had looked after my sister and me in Vermont so long ago.
I was not in the least afraid of him. Tri-benzo-Deportarnil was making me soign? and blas?, of course. But, also, I had had more than enough of the low comedy of living by then. I would have found it a rather shapely adventure, if the King had elected to hustle me in front of a firing squad.
“We thought you were dead,” he said.
“No, your Majesty,” I said.
“It’s been so long since we heard anything about you,” he said.
“Washington, D.C., runs out of ideas from time to time,” I said.
The scribes were taking all this down, all this history that was being made.
He held up the spine of the book so I could read it “Thucydides,” he said.
“Um,” I said.
“History is all I read,” he said.
“That is wise for a man in your position, your Majesty,” I replied.
“Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it,” he said.
The scribes scribbled away.
“Yes,” I said. “If our descendents don’t study our times closely, they will find that they have again exhausted the planet’s fossil fuels, that they have again died by the millions of influenza and The Green Death, that the sky has again been turned yellow by the propellants for underarm deodorants, that they have again elected a senile President two meters tall, and that they are yet again the intellectual and spiritual inferiors of teeny-weeny Chinese.”
He did not join my laughter.
I addressed his scribes directly, speaking over his head. “History is merely a list of surprises,” I said. “It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again. Please write that down.”
Chapter 49
IT turned out that the young King had an
historic document he wished me to sign. It was brief. In it, I acknowledged that I, the President of the United States of America, no longer exercised any control over that part of the North American Continent which was sold by Napoleon Bonaparte to my country in 1803, and which was known as “The Louisiana Purchase.”
I, therefore, according to the document, sold it for a dollar, to Stewart Oriole-2 Mott, the King of Michigan.
I signed with the teeny-weeniest signature possible. It looked like a baby ant. “Enjoy it in good health!” I said.
The territory I had sold him was largely occupied by the Duke of Oklahoma, and, no doubt, by other potentates and panjandrums unknown to me.
After that, we chatted some about his grandfather.
Then Captain O’Hare and I took off for Urbana, Illinois, and an electronic reunion with my sister, who had been dead so long.
Hi ho.
Yes, and I write now with a palsied hand and an aching head, for I drank much too much at my birthday party last night.
Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa arrived encrusted with diamonds, borne through the ailanthus forest in a sedan chair, accompanied by an entourage of fourteen slaves. She brought me wine and beer, which made me drunk. But her most intoxicating gifts were a thousand candles she and her slaves had made in a colonial candle mold. We fitted them into the empty mouths of my thousand candlesticks, and deployed them over the lobby floor.
Then we lit them all.
Standing among all those tiny, wavering lights, I felt as though I were God, up to my knees in the Milky Way.
Epilogue
DR. Swain died before he could write any
more. He went to his just reward.
There was nobody to read what he had written anyway – to complain about all the loose ends of the yarn he had spun.
He had reached the climax of his story, at any rate, with his reselling of the Louisiana Purchase to a bandit chief – for a dollar he never received.
Yes, and he died proud of what he and his sister had done to reform their society, for he left this poem, perhaps hoping that someone would use it for his epitaph:
“And how did we then face the odds,
“Of man’s rude slapstick, yes, and God’s?
“Quite at home and unafraid,
“Thank you,
“In a game our dreams remade.”
He never got to tell about the electronic device in Urbana, which made it possible for him to reunite his mind with that of his dead sister, to recreate the genius they had been in childhood.
The device, which those few people who knew about it called “The Hooligan,” consisted of a seemingly ordinary length of brown clay pipe – two meters long and twenty centimeters in diameter. It was placed just so – atop a steel cabinet containing controls for a huge particle-accelerator. The particle accelerator was a tubular magnetic race track for subatomic entities which looped through cornfields on the edge of town.
Yes.
And the Hooligan was itself a ghost, in a way, since the particle-accelerator had been dead for a long time, for want of electricity, for want of enthusiasts for all it could do.
A janitor, Francis Iron-7 Hooligan, stored the piece of pipe atop the dead cabinet, rested his lunchpail there, too, for the moment He heard voices from the pipe.
He fetched the scientist whose apparatus this had been, Dr. Felix Bauxite-13 von Peterswald. But the pipe refused to talk again.
Dr. von Peterswald demonstrated that he was a great scientist, however, with his willingness to believe the ignorant Mr. Hooligan. He made the janitor go over his story again and again.
“The lunchpail,” he said at last “Where is your lunchpail?”
Hooligan had it in his hand.
Dr. von Peterswald instructed him to place it in relation to the pipe exactly as it had been before.
The pipe began promptly to talk again.
The talkers identified themselves as persons in the afterlife. They were backed by a demoralized chorus of persons who complained to each other of tedium and social slights and minor ailments, and so on.
As Dr. von Peterswald said in his secret diary: “It sounded like nothing so much as the other end of a telephone call on a rainy autumn day – to a badly run turkey farm.”
Hi ho.
When Dr. Swain talked to his sister Eliza over the Hooligan, he was in the company of the widow of Dr. von Peterswald, Wihna Pachysandra-17 von Peterswald, and her fifteen-year-old son, David Daffodil-11 von Peterswald, a brother of Dr. Swain, and a victim of Tourette’s Disease.
Poor David suffered an attack of his disease – just as Dr. Swain was beginning to talk with Eliza across the Great Divide.
David tried to choke down the involuntary stream of obscenities, but succeeded only in raising their pitch an octave. “Shit … sputum … scrotum … cloaca … asshole … pecker … mucous membrane … earwax … piss,” he said.
And Dr. Swain himself went out of control. He climbed involuntarily on top of the cabinet, as tall and old as he was. He crouched over the pipe, to be that much closer to his sister. He hung his head upside-down in front of the business end of the pipe, and knocked the crucial lunchpail to the floor, breaking the connection.