Oveta remained transfixed. I at last had to snap my fingers under her nose to wake her up.
She curtseyed. “As you wish, Mistress Eliza,” she said. And she went to spread the news.
As we settled ourselves in the solarium, the rest of the staff straggled in humbly – to have a look at the young master and the young mistress we had become.
We greeted them by their full names. We asked them friendly questions which indicated that we had detailed understanding of their lives. We apologized for having perhaps shocked some of them for changing so quickly.
“We simply did not realize,” Eliza said, “that anybody wanted us to be intelligent.”
We were by then so in charge of things that I, too, dared to speak of important matters. My high voice wouldn’t be silly any more.
“With your cooperation,” I said, “we will make this mansion famous for intelligence as it has been infamous for idiocy in days gone by. Let the fences come down.”
“Are there any questions?” said Eliza.
There were none.
Somebody called Dr. Mott.
Our mother did not come down to breakfast. She remained in bed – petrified.
Father came down alone. He was wearing his nightclothes. He had not shaved. Young as he was, he was palsied and drawn.
Eliza and I were puzzled that he did not look happier. We hailed him not only in English, but in several other languages we knew.
It was to one of these foreign salutations that he responded at last. “Bon jour,” he said.
“Sit thee doon! Sit thee doon!” said Eliza merrily.
The poor man sat.
He was sick with guilt, of course, over having allowed intelligent human beings, his own flesh and blood, to be treated like idiots for so long.
Worse: His conscience and his advisors had told him before that it was all right if he could not love us, since we were incapable of deep feelings, and since there was nothing about us, objectively, that anyone in his right mind could love. But now it was his duty to love us, and he did not think he could do it.
He was horrified to discover what our mother knew she would discover, if she came downstairs: That intelligence and sensitivity in monstrous bodies like Eliza’s and mine merely made us more repulsive.
This was not Father’s fault or Mother’s fault It was not anybody’s fault It was as natural as breathing to all human beings, and to all warm-blooded creatures, for that matter, to wish quick deaths for monsters. This was an instinct.
And now Eliza and I had raised that instinct to intolerable tragedy.
Without knowing what we were doing, Eliza and I were putting the traditional curse of monsters on normal creatures. We were asking for respect.
Chapter 12
IN the midst of all the excitement, Eliza and I
allowed our heads to be separated by several feet – so we were not thinking brilliantly any more.
We became dumb enough to think that Father was merely sleepy. So we made him drink coffee, and we tried to wake him up with some songs and riddles we knew.
I remember I asked him if he knew why cream was so much more expensive than milk.
He mumbled that he didn’t know the answer.
So Eliza told him, “It’s because the cows hate to squat on the little bottles.”
We laughed about that. We rolled on the floor. And then Eliza got up and stood over him, with her hands on her hips, and scolded him affectionately, as though he were a little boy. “Oh, what a sleepyhead!” she said. “Oh, what a sleepyhead!”
At that moment, Dr. Stewart Rawlings Mott arrived.
Although Dr. Mott had been told on the telephone about Eliza’s and my sudden metamorphosis, the day was like any other day to him, seemingly. He said what he always said when he arrived at the mansion: “And how is everybody today?”
I now spoke the first intelligent sentence Dr. Mott had ever heard from me. “Father won’t wake up,” I said.
“Won’t he, now?” he replied. He rewarded the completeness of my sentence with the faintest of smiles.
Dr. Mott was so unbelievably bland, in fact, that he turned away from us to chat with Oveta Cooper, the practical nurse. Her mother had apparently been sick down in the hamlet. “Oveta – ” he said, “you’ll be pleased to know that your mother’s temperature is almost normal.”
Father was angered by this casualness, and no doubt glad to find someone with whom he could be openly angry.
“How long has this been going on, Doctor?” he wanted to know. “How long have you known about their intelligence?”
Dr. Mott looked at his watch. “Since about forty-two minutes ago,” he said.
“You don’t seem in the least surprised,” said Father.
Dr. Mott appeared to think this over, then he shrugged. “I’m certainly very happy for everybody,” he said.
I think it was the fact that Dr. Mott himself did not look at all happy when he said that which caused Eliza and me to put our heads together again. Some* thing very queer was going on that we badly needed to understand.
Our genius did not foil us. It allowed us to understand the truth of the situation – that we were somehow more tragic than ever.
But our genius, like all geniuses, suffered periodic fits of monumental na?vet?. It did so now. It told us that all we had to do to make everything all right again was to return to idiocy.
“Buh,” said Eliza.
“Duh,” I said.
I farted.
Eliza drooled.
I picked up a buttered scone and threw it at the head of Oveta Cooper.
Eliza turned to Father. “Bluthluh!” she said.
“Fuff-bay!” I cried.
Father cried.
Chapter 13
SIX days have passed since I began to write
this memoir. On four of the days, the gravity was medium – what it used to be in olden times. It was so heavy yesterday, that I could hardly get out of bed, out of my nest of rags in the lobby of the Empire State Building. When I had to go to the elevator shaft we use for a toilet, making my way through the thicket of candlesticks I own, I crawled on all fours.
Hi ho.
Well – the gravity was light on the first day, and it is light again today. I have an erection again, and so does Isadore, the lover of my granddaughter Melody. So does every male on the island.
Yes, and Melody and Isadore have packed a picnic lunch, and have gone bounding up to the intersection of Broadway and Forty-second Street, where, on days of light gravity, they are building a rustic pyramid.
They do not shape the slabs and chunks and boulders they put into it, and neither do they limit their materials to masonry. They throw in I-beams and oil drums and tires and automobile parts and office furniture and theater seats, too, and all manner of junk. But I have seen the results, and what they are building will not be an amorphous trash-pile when it is done. It will clearly be a pyramid.
Yes, and if archaeologists of the future find this book of mine, they will be spared the fruitless labor of digging through the pyramid in search of its meaning. There are no secret treasure rooms in there, no chambers of any kind.
Its meaning, which is minuscule in any event; lies beneath the manhole cover over which the pyramid is constructed. It is the body of a stillborn male.
The infant is enclosed in an ornate box which was once a humidor for fine cigars. That box was placed on the floor of the manhole four years ago, amid all the cables and pipes down there – by Melody, who was its mother at the age of twelve, and by me, who was its great-grandfather, and by our nearest neighbor and dearest friend, Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa.
The pyramid itself is entirely the idea of Melody and Isadore, who became her lover later on. It is a monument to a life that was never lived – to a person who was never named.
Hi ho.
It is not necessary to dig through the pyramid to reach the box. It can be reached through other manholes.
Beware of rats.
Since the infant was an heir of mine, the pyramid might be called this: ‘The Tomb of the Prince of Candlesticks.”
The name of the father of the Prince of Candlesticks is unknown. He forced his attentions on Melody on the outskirts of Schenectady. She was on her way from Detroit, in the Kingdom of Michigan, to the Island of Death, where she hoped to find her grandfather, who was the legendary Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain.
Melody is pregnant again – this time by Isadore.
She is a bow-legged little thing, rickety and snaggle-toothed, but cheerful. She ate very badly as a child – as an orphan in the harem of the King of Michigan.