While my brother and I waited for the plane to take off for Indianapolis, he made me a present of a joke by Mark Twain – about an opera Twain had seen in Italy. Twain said that he hadn’t heard anything like it ” … since the orphanage burned down.”
We laughed.
He asked me politely how my work was going. I think he respects but is baffled by my work.
I said that I was sick of it, but that I had always been sick of it. I told him a remark which I had heard attributed to the writer Renata Adler, who hates writing, that a writer was a person who hated writing.
I told him, too, what my agent, Max Wilkinson, wrote to me after I complained again about what a disagreeable profession I had. This was it: “Dear Kurt – I never knew a blacksmith who was in love with his anvil.”
We laughed again, but I think the joke was partly lost on my brother. His life has been an unending honeymoon with his anvil.
I told him that I had been going to operas recently, and that the set for the first act of Tosca had looked exactly like the interior of Union Station in Indianapolis to me. While the actual opera was going on, I said, I daydreamed about putting track numbers in the archways of the set, and passing out bells and whistles to the orchestra, and staging an opera about Indianapolis during the Age of the Iron Horse.
“People from our great-grandfathers’ generation would mingle with our own, when we were young – ” I said, “and all the generations in between. Arrivals and departures would be announced. Uncle Alex would leave for his job as a spy in Baltimore. You would come home from your freshman year at M.I.T.
“There would be shoals of relatives,” I said, “watching the travelers come and go – and black men to carry the luggage and shine the shoes.”
“Every so often in my opera,” I said, “the stage would turn mud-colored with uniforms. That would be a war.
“And then it would clear up again.”
After the plane took off, my brother showed me a piece of scientific apparatus which he had brought along. It was a photoelectric cell connected to a small tape recorder. He aimed the electric eye at clouds. It perceived lightning flashes which were invisible to us in the dazzle of daytime.
The secret flashes were recorded as clicks by the recorder. We could also hear the clicks as they happened – on a tiny earphone.
“There’s a hot one,” my brother announced. He indicated a distant cumulus cloud, a seeming Pike’s Peak of whipped cream.
He let me listen to the clicks. There were two quick ones, then some silence, then three quick ones, then silence again.
“How far away is that cloud?” I asked him.
“Oh – a hundred miles, maybe,” he said.
I thought it was beautiful that my big brother could detect secrets so simply from so far away.
I lit a cigarette.
Bernard doesn’t smoke any more, because it is so important that he live a good while longer. He still has two little boys to raise.
Yes, and while my big brother meditated about clouds, the mind I was given daydreamed the story in this book. It is about desolated cities and spiritual cannibalism and incest and loneliness and lovelessness and death, and so on. It depicts myself and my beautiful sister as monsters, and so on.
This is only natural, since I dreamed it on the way to a funeral.
It is about this terribly old man in the ruins of Manhattan, you see, where almost everyone has been killed by a mysterious disease called “The Green Death.”
He lives there with his illiterate, rickety, pregnant little granddaughter, Melody. Who is he really? I guess he is myself – experimenting with being old.
Who is Melody? I thought for a while that she was all that remained of my memory of my sister. I now believe that she is what I feel to be, when I experiment with old age, all that is left of my optimistic imagination, of my creativeness.
Hi ho.
The old man is writing his autobiography. He begins it with words which my late Uncle Alex told me one time should be used by religious skeptics as a prelude I to their nightly prayers.
These are the words: “To whom it may concern.”
Chapter 1
TO whom it may concern:
It is springtime. It is late afternoon.
Smoke from a cooking fire on the terrazzo floor of the lobby of the Empire State Building on the Island of Death floats out over the ailanthus jungle which Thirty-fourth Street has become.
The pavement on the floor of the jungle is all crinkum-crankum – heaved this way and that by frostheaves and roots.
There is a small clearing in the jungle. A blue-eyed, lantern-jawed old white man, who is two meters tall and one hundred years old, sits in the clearing on what was once the back seat of a taxicab.
I am that man.
My name is Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain.
I am barefoot. I wear a purple toga made from draperies found in the ruins of the Americana Hotel.
I am a former President of the United States of America. I was the final President, the tallest President, and the only one ever to have been divorced while occupying the White House.
I inhabit the first floor of the Empire State Building with my sixteen-year-old granddaughter, who is Melody Oriole-2 von Peterswald, and with her lover, Isadore Raspberry-19 Cohen. The three of us have the building all to ourselves.
Our nearest neighbor is one and one-half kilometers away.
I have just heard one of her roosters crow.
Our nearest neighbor is Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa, a woman who loves life and is better at it than anyone I ever knew. She is a strong and warm-hearted and hard-working farmer in her early sixties. She is built like a fireplug. She has slaves whom she treats very well. And she and the slaves raise cattle and pigs and chickens and goats and corn and wheat and vegetables and fruits and grapes along the shores of the East River.
They have built a windmill for grinding grain, and a still for making brandy, and a smokehouse – and on and on.
“Vera – ” I told her the other day, “if you would only write us a new Declaration of Independence, you would be the Thomas Jefferson of modern times.”
I write this book on the stationery of the Continental Driving School, three boxes of which Melody and Isadore found in a closet on the sixty-fourth floor of our home. They also found a gross of ball-point pens.
Visitors from the mainland are rare. The bridges are down. The tunnels are crushed. And boats will not come near us, for fear of the plague peculiar to this island, which is called “The Green Death.”
And it is that plague which has earned Manhattan the sobriquet, “The Island of Death.”
Hi ho.
It is a thing I often say these days: “Hi ho.” It is a kind of senile hiccup. I have lived too long.
Hi ho.
The gravity is very light today. I have an erection as a result of that All males have erections on days like this. They are automatic consequences of near-weightlessness. They have little to do with eroticism in most cases, and nothing to do with it in the life of a man my age. They are hydraulic experiences – the results of confused plumbing, and little more.
Hi ho.
The gravity is so light today, that I feel as though I might scamper to the top of the Empire State Building with a manhole cover, and fling it into New Jersey.
That would surely be an improvement on George Washington’s sailing a silver dollar across the Rappahannock. And yet some people insist that there is no such thing as progress.
I am sometimes called “The King of Candlesticks,” because I own more than one thousand candlesticks.
But I am fonder of my middle name, which is “Daffodil-11.” And I have written this poem about it, and about life itself, of course:
“I was those seeds,
“I am this meat,
“This meat hates pain,
“This meat must eat.
“This meat must sleep,
“This meat must dream,
“This meat must laugh,
“This meat must scream.
“But when, as meat,
“It’s had its fill,
“Please plant it as
“A Daffodil.”
And who will read all this? God knows. Not Melody and Isadore, surely. Like all the other young people on the island, they can neither read nor write.
They have no curiosity about the human past, nor about what life may be like on the mainland.
As far as they are concerned, the most glorious accomplishment of the people who inhabited this island so teemingly was to die, so we could have it all to ourselves.