No matter how large Eliza and I became, though, one figure remained constant in his reports: Our mental age was between two and three.
Hi ho.
“Flocka Butt,” along with my sister, of course, is one of the few people I am really hungry to see in the afterlife.
I am dying to ask him what he really thought of us as children – how much he suspected, how much he really knew.
Eliza and I must have given him thousands of clues as to our intelligence. We weren’t the cleverest of deceivers. We were only children, after all.
It seems probable to me that, when we babbled in his presence, we used words from some foreign language which he could recognize. He may have gone into the library of the mansion, which was of no interest to the servants, and found the books somehow disturbed.
He may have discovered the secret passageways himself, through some accident. He used to wander around the house a great deal after he was through with us, I know, explaining to the servants that his father was an architect. He may have actually gone into the secret passageways, and found books we were reading in there, and seen that the floors were spattered with candlewax.
Who knows?
I would like to know, too, what his secret sorrow was. Eliza and I, when we were young, were so wrapped up in each other that we rarely noticed the emotional condition of anybody else. But we were surely impressed by Dr. Mott’s sadness. So it must have been profound.
I once asked his grandson, the King of Michigan, Stewart Oriole-2 Mott, if he had any idea why Dr. Mott had found life to be such a crushing affair. “Gravity hadn’t yet turned mean,” I said. ‘The sky had not yet turned from blue to yellow, never to be blue again. The planet’s natural resources had yet to come to an end. The country had not yet been depopulated by Albanian flu and The Green Death.
“Your grandfather had a nice little car and a nice little house and a nice little practice and a nice little wife and a nice little child,” I said to the King. “And yet he used to mope so!”
My interview with the King took place, incidentally, in his palace on Lake Maxinkuckee, in northern Indiana, where Culver Military Academy had once stood. I was still nominally the President of the United States of America, but I had lost control of everything. There wasn’t any Congress any more, or any system of Federal Courts, or any Treasury or Army or any of that.
There were probably only eight hundred people left in all of Washington, D.C. I was down to one employee when I paid my respects to the King.
Hi ho.
He asked me if I regarded him as an enemy, and I said, “Heavens, no, Your Highness – I am delighted that someone of your calibre has brought kw and order to the Middle West”
He grew impatient with me when I pressed him to tell me more about his grandfather, Dr. Mott.
“Christ,” he said, “what American knows anything about his grandparents?”
He was a skinny and supple and ascetic young soldier-saint in those days. My granddaughter, Melody, would come to know him when he was an obscene voluptuary, a fat old man in robes encrusted with precious stones.
He was wearing a simple soldier’s tunic without any badges of rank when I met him.
As for my own costume: It was appropriately clownish – a top hat, a claw-hammer coat and striped pants, a pearl-gray vest with matching spats, a soiled white shirt with a choke collar and tie. The belly of my vest was festooned with a gold watch-chain which had belonged to John D. Rockefeller, the ancestor of mine who had founded Standard Oil.
Dangling from the watch-chain were my Phi Beta Kappa key from Harvard and a miniature plastic daffodil. My middle name had by then been legally changed from Rockefeller to Daffodil-11.
“There were no murders or embezzlements or suicides or drinking problems or drug problems in Dr. Mott’s branch of the family,” the King went on, “as far as I know.”
He was thirty. I was seventy-nine.
“Maybe Grandfather was just one of those people who was born unhappy,” he said. “Did you ever think of that?”
Chapter 6
PERHAPS some people really are born
unhappy. I surely hope not.
Speaking for my sister and myself: We were born with the capacity and the determination to be utterly happy all the time.
Perhaps even in this we were freaks.
Hi ho.
What is happiness?
In Eliza’s and my case, happiness was being perpetually in each other’s company, having plenty of servants and good food, living in a peaceful, book-filled mansion on an asteroid covered with apple trees, and growing up as specialized halves of a single brain.
Although we pawed and embraced each other a great deal, our intentions were purely intellectual. True – Eliza matured sexually at the age of seven. I, however, would not enter puberty until my last year in Harvard Medical School, at the age of twenty-three. Eliza and I used bodily contact only in order to increase the intimacy of our brains.
Thus did we give birth to a single genius, which died as quickly as we were parted, which was reborn the moment we got together again.
We became almost cripplingly specialized as halves of that genius, which was the most important individual in our lives, but which we never named.
When we learned to read and write, for example, it was I who actually did the reading and writing. Eliza remained illiterate until the day she died.
But it was Eliza who did the great intuitive leaping for us both. It was Eliza who guessed that it would be in our best interests to remain speechless, but to become toilet-trained. It was Eliza who guessed what books were, and what the little marks on the pages might mean.
It was Eliza who sensed that there was something cockeyed about the dimensions of some of the mansion’s rooms and corridors. And it was I who did the methodical work of taking actual measurements, and then probing the paneling and parquetry with screwdrivers and kitchen knives, seeking doors to an alternate universe, which we found.
Hi ho.
Yes, I did all the reading. And it seems to me now that there is not a single book published in an Indo-European language before the First World War that I have not read aloud.
But it was Eliza who did the memorizing, and who told me what we had to learn next. And it was Eliza who could put seemingly unrelated ideas together in order to get a new one. It was Eliza who juxtaposed.
Much of our information was hopelessly out of date, of course, since few new books had been brought into the mansion since 1912. Much of it, too, was timeless. And much of it was downright silly, such as the dances we learned to do.
If I wished, I could do a very presentable and historically accurate version of the Tarantella, here in the ruins of New York.
Were Eliza and I really a genius, when we thought as one?
I have to say yes, especially in view of the fact that we had no instructors. And I am not boasting when I say so, for I am only half of that fine mind.
We criticized Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, I remember, on the grounds the creatures would become terribly vulnerable while attempting to improve themselves, while developing wings or armorplate, say. They would be eaten up by more practical animals, before their wonderful new features could be refined.
We made at least one prediction that was so deadly accurate that thinking about it even now leaves me thunderstruck.
Listen: We began with the mystery of how ancient peoples had erected the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, and the great heads of Easter Island, and the barbaric arches of Stonehenge, without modern power sources and tools.
We concluded there must have been days of light gravity in olden times, when people could play tiddledy winks with huge chunks of stone.
We supposed that it might even be abnormal on earth for gravity to be stable for long periods of time. We predicted that at any moment gravity might become as capricious as winds and heat and cold, as blizzards and rainstorms again.
Yes, and Eliza and I composed a precocious critique of the Constitution of the United States of America, too. We argued that it was as good a scheme for misery as any, since its success in keeping the common people reasonably happy and proud depended on the strength of the people themselves – and yet it described no practical machinery which would tend to make the people, as opposed to their elected representatives, strong.