“Hello? Hello?” he said.
“Perineum … fuck … turd … glans … mount of Venus … afterbirth,” said the boy.
The widow von Peterswald was the only stable person on the Urbana end, so it was she who re- “-. stored the lunchpail to its correct position. She had to jam it rather brutally between the pipe and the knee of the President. Then she found herself trapped in a grotesque position, bent at a right angle across the top of the cabinet, one arm extended, and her feet a few inches off the floor. The President had clamped down not only on the lunchpail, but on her hand.
“Hello? Hello?” said the President, his head upside down.
There were answering gabblings and gobblings and squawks and clucks from the other end.
Somebody sneezed.
“Bugger … defecate … semen … balls,” said the boy.
Before Eliza could speak again, dead people in the background sensed that poor David was a kindred spirit, as outraged by the human condition in the Universe as they were. So they egged him on, and contributed obscenities of their own.
“You tell ‘em, kid,” they said, and so on.
And they doubled everything. “Double cock! Double clit!” they’d say. “Double shit!” and so on.
It was bedlam.
But Dr. Swain and his sister got together anyway, with such convulsive intimacy that Dr. Swain would have crawled into the pipe, if he could.
Yes, and what Eliza wanted from him was that he should die as soon as possible, so that the two of them could put their heads together. She wanted then to figure out ways to improve the utterly unsatisfactory, so-called “Paradise.”
“Are you being tortured there?” he asked her.
“No,” she said, “we are being bored stiff. Whoever designed this place knew nothing about human beings. Please, brother Wilbur,” she said, “this is Eternity here. This is forever! Where you are now is just nothing in terms of time! It’s a joke! Blow your brains out as quick as you can.”
And so on.
Dr. Swain told her about the problems the living had been having with incurable diseases. The two of them, thinking as one, made child’s play of the mystery.
The explanation was this: The flu germs were Martians, whose invasion had apparently been repelled by anti-bodies in the systems of the survivors, since, for the moment, anyway, there was no more flu.
The Green Death, on the other hand, was caused by microscopic Chinese, who were peace-loving and meant no one any harm. They were nonetheless invariably fatal to normal-sized human beings when inhaled or ingested.
And so on.
Dr. Swain asked his sister what sort of communications apparatus there was on the other end – whether Eliza, too, was squatting over a piece of pipe, or what.
Eliza told him that there was no apparatus, but only a feeling.
“What is the feeling?” he said.
“You would have to be dead to understand my description of it,” she said.
“Try it anyway, Eliza,” he said.
“It is like being dead,” she said.
“A feeling of deadness,” he said tentatively, trying to understand.
“Yes – coldness and clamminess – ” she said.
“Um,” he said.
“But also like being surrounded by a swarm of invisible bees,” she said. “Your voice comes from the bees.”
Hi ho.
When Dr. Swain was through with this particular ordeal, he had only eleven tablets left of tri-benzo-Deportamil, which were originally created, of course, not as a narcotic for presidents, but as suppressants for the symptoms of Tourette’s Disease.
And the remaining pills, when he displayed them to himself in the palm of his huge hand, inevitably looked to him like the remaining grains in the hourglass of his life.
Dr. Swain was standing in the sunshine outside the laboratory building containing the Hooligan. With him were the widow and her son. The widow had the lunchpail, so that only she could turn the Hooligan on.
The gravity was light. Dr. Swain had an erection. So did the boy. So did Captain Bernard Daffodil-11 O’Hare, who stood by the helicopter nearby.
Presumably, the erectile tissues in the widow’s body were also engorged.
“You know what you looked like on top of that cabinet, Mr. President?” said the boy. He was clearly sickened by what his disease was about to make him say.
“No,” said Dr. Swain.
“Lake the biggest baboon in the world – trying to fuck a football,” blurted the boy.
Dr. Swain, in order to avoid any more insults like that, handed his remaining supply of tri-benzo-Deportamil to the boy.
The consequences of his withdrawal from tri-benzo-Depotamil were spectacular. Dr. Swain had to be tied to a bed in the widow’s house for six nights and days.
Somewhere in there he made love to the widow, conceiving a son who would become the father of Melody Oriole-2 von Peterswald.
Yes, and somewhere in there the widow passed on to him what she had learned from the Chinese – that they had become successful manipulators of the Universe by combining harmonious minds.
Yes, and then he had his pilot fly him to Manhattan, the Island of Death. He intended to die there, to join his sister in the afterlife – as a result of inhaling and ingesting invisible Chinese communists.
Captain O’Hare, not wishing to die yet himself, lowered his President by means of a winch and rope and harness to the observation deck of the Empire State Building.
The President spent the remainder of the day up there, enjoying the view. And then, breathing deeply with every few steps, hoping to inhale Chinese communists, he descended the stairs.
It was twilight when he reached the bottom.
There were human skeletons in the lobby – in rotting nests of rags. The walls were zebra-striped with soot from cooking fires of long ago.
There was a painting of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped on one wall.
Dr. Swain for the first time heard the shuddering whir of bats leaving the subway system for the night.
He considered himself to be already a dead man – a brother to the skeletons.
But six members of the Raspberry family, who had observed his arrival by helicopter, suddenly came out of hiding in the lobby. They were armed with spears and knives.
When they understood who they had captured, they were thrilled. He was a treasure to them not because he was President, but because he had been to medical school.
“A doctor! Now we have everything!” said one.
Yes, and they would not hear of his wish to die. They forced him to swallow a small trapezoid of what seemed to be a tasteless sort of peanut-brittle. It was in fact boiled and dried fish guts, which contained the antidote to The Green Death.
Hi ho.
The Raspberries hustled him down to the Financial District at once, for Hiroshi Raspberry-20 Yamashiro, the head of the family, was deathly ill.
The man seemed to have pneumonia. Dr. Swain could do nothing for him but what physicians of a century before would have done, which was to keep his body warm and his forehead cool – and to wait.
Either the fever would break, or the man would die.
The fever broke.
As a reward, the Raspberries brought their most precious possessions to Dr. Swain on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. There was a clock-radio, an alto saxophone, a fully-fitted toiletries kit, a model of the Eiffel Tower with a thermometer in it – and on and on.
From all this junk, and merely to be polite, Dr. Swain selected a single brass candlestick.
And thus was the legend established that he was crazy about candlesticks.
Thereafter, everybody would give him candlesticks.
He did not like the communal life of the Raspberries, which required him, among other things, to jerk his head around perpetually, in search of the kidnapped Jesus Christ.
So he cleaned up the lobby of the Empire State Building, and moved in there. The Raspberries supplied him with food.
And time flew.
Somewhere in there, Vera Chipmunk’s Zappa arrived, and was given the antidote by the Raspberries. They hoped she would be Dr. Swain’s nurse.
And she was his nurse for a little while, but then she started her model farm.
And little Melody arrived a long time after that, pregnant, and pushing her pathetic worldly goods ahead of her in a dilapidated baby carriage. Among those goods was a Dresden candlestick. Even in the Kingdom of Michigan, it was well known that the legendary King of New York was crazy about candlesticks.
Melody’s candlestick depicted a nobleman’s flirtation with a shepherdess at the foot of a treetrunk enlaced in flowering vines.
Melody’s candlestick was broken on the old man’s last birthday. It was kicked over by Wanda Chipmunk-5 Rivera, an intoxicated slave.
When Melody first presented herself at the Empire State Building, and Dr. Swain came out to ask who she was and what she wanted, she went down on her knees to him. Her little hands were extended before her, holding the candlestick.