Slapstick or Lonesome No More!

  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-Deportamil was making me soigne and blase, 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."

  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, Wilma 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 p
ipe, and knocked the crucial lunchpail to the floor, breaking the connection.

  "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 restored 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.

  "Urn," 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.

  "Like 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-Deportamil 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 com
munal 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-5 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.

  "Hello, Grandfather," she said.

  He hesitated for a moment. But then he helped her to her feet. "Come in," he said. "Come in, come in."

  *

  Dr. Swain did not know at that time that he had sired a son during his withdrawal from tri-benzo-Deportamil in Urbana. He supposed that Melody was a random supplicant and fan. Nor did he bring to that first encounter any daydreams of having descendents somewhere. He had never much wanted to reproduce himself.

  So, when Melody gave him shy but convincing arguments that she was an actual blood relative, he had a feeling that he, as he later explained to Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa, "had somehow sprung a huge leak. And out of that sudden, painless opening," he went on, "there crawled a famished child, pregnant and clasping a Dresden candlestick.

  "Hi ho."

  *

  Melody's story was this:

  Her father, who was the illegitimate child of Dr. Swain and the widow in Urbana, was one of the few survivors of the so-called "Urbana Massacre." He was then pressed into service as a drummer boy in the army of the perpetrator of the massacre, the Duke of Oklahoma.

  The boy begat Melody at the age of fourteen. Her mother was a forty-year-old laundress who had attached herself to the army. Melody was given the middle name "Oriole-2," to ensure that she would be treated with maximal mercy, should she be captured by the forces of Stewart Oriole-2 Mott, the King of Michigan, the chief enemy of the Duke.