Slapstick Or Lonesome No More! Part 12

40.

BECAUSE EVERYTHING had dwindled so quickly, and because there was no one to behave sanely for any more, I developed a mania for counting things. I counted slats in Venetian blinds. I counted the knives and forks and spoons in the kitchen. I counted the tufts of the coverlet on Abraham Lincoln's bed. had dwindled so quickly, and because there was no one to behave sanely for any more, I developed a mania for counting things. I counted slats in Venetian blinds. I counted the knives and forks and spoons in the kitchen. I counted the tufts of the coverlet on Abraham Lincoln's bed.

And I was counting posts in a bannister one day, on my hands and knees on the staircase, although the gravity was medium-to-light. And then I realized that a man was watching me from below.

He was dressed in buckskins and moccasins and a c.o.o.n-skin hat, and carried a rifle.

"My G.o.d, President Daffodil," I said to myself, "you've really gone crazy this time. That's ol' Daniel Boone down there."

And then another man joined the first one. He was dressed like a military pilot back in the days, long before I was President, when there had been such a thing as a United States Air Force.

"Let me guess:" I said out loud, "It's either Halloween or the Fourth of July."

The pilot seemed to be shocked by the condition of the White House. "What's happened here?" he said.

"All I can tell you," I said, "is that history has been made."

"This is terrible," he said.

"If you think this is bad," I told him, and I tapped my forehead with my fingertips, "you should see what it looks like in here." here."

Neither one of them even suspected that I was the President. I had become quite a mess by then.

They did not even want to talk to me, or to each other, for that matter. They were strangers, it turned out. They had simply happened to arrive at the same time-each one on an urgent mission.

They went into other rooms, and found my Sancho Panza, Carlos Daffodil-11 Villavicencio, who was making a lunch of Navy hardtack and canned smoked oysters, and some other things he'd found. And Carlos brought them back to me, and convinced them that I was indeed the President of what he called, in all sincerity, "the most powerful country in the world."

Carlos was a really stupid man.

The frontiersman had a letter for me-from the widow in Urbana, Illinois, who had been visited a few years before by Chinese. I had been too busy ever to find out what the Chinese had been after out there.

"Dear Dr. Swain," it began- "I am an undistinguished person, a piano teacher, who is remarkable only for having been married to a very great physicist, to have had a beautiful son by him, and after his death, to have been visited by a delegation of very small Chinese, one of whom said his father had known you. His father's name was 'Fu Manchu.'"It was the Chinese who told me about the astonis.h.i.+ng discovery my husband, Dr. Felix Bauxite-13 von Peterswald, made just before he died. My son, who is incidentally a Daffodil-11, like yourself, and I have kept this discovery a secret ever since, because the light it throws on the situation of human beings in the Universe is very demoralizing, to say the least. It has to do with the true nature of what awaits us all after death. What awaits us, Dr. Swain, is tedious in the extreme."I can't bring myself to call it 'Heaven' or 'Our Just Reward,' or any of those sweet things. All I can call it is what my husband came to call it, and what you will call it, too, after you have investigated it, which is 'The Turkey Farm.'"In short, Dr. Swain, my husband discovered a way to talk to dead people on The Turkey Farm. He never taught the technique to me or my son, or to anybody. But the Chinese, who apparently have spies everywhere, somehow found out about it. They came to study his journals and to see what was left of his apparatus."After they had figured it out, they were nice enough to explain to my son and me how we might do the gruesome trick, if we wished to. They themselves were disappointed with the discovery. It was new to them, they said, but could be 'interesting only to partic.i.p.ants in what is left of Western Civilization,' whatever that means."I am entrusting this letter to a friend who hopes to join a large settlement of his artificial relatives, the Berylliums, in Maryland, which is very near you."I address you as 'Dr. Swain' rather than 'Mr. President,' because this letter has nothing to do with the national interest. It is a highly personal letter, informing you that we have spoken to your dead sister Eliza many times on my husband's apparatus. She says that it is of the utmost importance that you come here in order that she may converse directly with you."We eagerly await your visit. Please do not be insulted by the behavior of my son and your brother, David Daffodil-11 von Peterswald, who cannot prevent himself from speaking obscenities and making insulting gestures at even the most inappropriate moments. He is a victim of Tourette's Disease."Your faithful servant, "Wilma Pachysandra-17 von Peterswald."

Hi ho.

41.

I WAS DEEPLY MOVED WAS DEEPLY MOVED, despite tri-benzo-Deportamil.

I stared out at the frontiersman's sweaty horse, which was grazing in the high gra.s.s of the White House lawn. And then I turned to the messenger himself. "How came you by this message?" I said.

He told me that he had accidentally shot a man, apparently Wilma Pachysandra-17 von Peterswald's friend, the Beryllium, on the border between Tennessee and West Virginia. He had mistaken him for an hereditary enemy.

"I thought he was Newton McCoy," he said.

He tried to nurse his innocent victim back to health, but he died of gangrene. But, before he died, the Beryllium made him promise as a Christian to deliver a letter he had himself sworn to hand over to the President of the United States.

I asked him his name.

"Byron Hatfield," he said.

"What is your Government-issue middle name?" I said.

"We never paid no mind to that," he replied.

It turned out that he belonged to one of the few genuine extended families of blood relatives in the country, which had been at perpetual war with another such family since 1882.

"We never was big for them new-fangled middle names," he said.

The frontiersman and I were seated on spindly golden ballroom chairs which had supposedly been bought for the White House by Jacqueline Kennedy so long ago. The pilot was similarly supported, alertly awaiting his turn to speak. I glanced at the name-plate over the breast pocket of the pilot. It said this: CAPT. BERNARD O'HARE "Captain," I said, "you're another one who doesn't seem to go in for the new-fangled middle names." I noticed, too, that he was much too old to be only a captain, even if there had still been such a thing. He was in fact almost sixty.

I concluded that he was a lunatic who had found the costume somewhere. I supposed that he had become so elated and addled by his new appearance, that nothing would do but that he show himself off to his President.

The truth was, though, that he was perfectly sane. He had been stationed for the past eleven years in the bottom of a secret, underground silo in Rock Creek Park. I had never heard of the silo before.

But there was a Presidential helicopter concealed in it, along with thousands of gallons of absolutely priceless gasoline.

He had come out at last, in violation of his orders, he said, to find out "what on Earth was going on."

I had to laugh.

"Is the helicopter still ready to fly?" I asked.

"Yes, sir, it is," he said. He had been maintaining it single-handedly for the past two years. His mechanics had wandered off one-by-one.

"Young man," I said, "I'm going to give you a medal for this." I took a b.u.t.ton from my own tattered lapel, and I pinned it to his.

It said this, of course:

42.

THE FRONTIERSMAN refused a similar decoration. He asked for food, instead-to sustain him on his long trip back to his native mountains. refused a similar decoration. He asked for food, instead-to sustain him on his long trip back to his native mountains.

We gave him what we had, which was all the hardtack and canned smoked oysters his saddlebags would hold.

Yes, and Captain Bernard O'Hare and Carlos Daffodil-11 Villavicencio and I took off from the silo on the following dawn. It was a day of such salubrious gravity, that our helicopter expended no more energy than would have an airborne milkweed seed.

As we fluttered over the White House, I waved to it.

"Goodbye," I said.

My plan was to fly first to Indianapolis, which had become densely populated with Daffodils. They had been flocking there from everywhere.

We would leave Carlos there, to be cared for by his artificial relatives during his sunset years. I was glad to be getting rid of him. He bored me to tears.

We would go next to Urbana, I told Captain O'Hare-and then to my childhood home in Vermont.

"After that," I promised, "the helicopter is yours, Captain. You can fly like a bird wherever you wish. But you're going to have a rotten time of it, if you don't give yourself a good middle name."

"You're the President," he said. "You give me a name."

"I dub thee 'Eagle-1,'" I said.

He was awfully pleased. He loved the medal, too.

Yes, and I still had a little tri-benzo-Deportamil left, and I was so delighted to be going simply anywhere, after having been cooped up in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. so long, that I heard myself singing for the first time in years.

I remember the song I sang, too. It was one Eliza and I used to sing a lot in secret, back when we were still believed to be idiots. We would sing it where n.o.body could hear us-in the mausoleum of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.

And I think now that I will teach it to Melody and Isadore at my birthday party. It is such a good song for them to sing when they set out for new adventures on the Island of Death.

It goes like this: "Oh, we're off to see the Wizard, "The wonderful Wizard of Oz.

"If ever a whiz of a Wiz there was, "It was the Wizard of Oz."*

And so on.

Hi ho.

* Copyright 1939, renewed 1966 Leo Feist, Inc., New York, N.Y. Copyright 1939, renewed 1966 Leo Feist, Inc., New York, N.Y.

43.

MELODY AND I ISADORE went down to Wall Street today-to visit Isadore's large family, the Raspberries. I was invited to become a Raspberry at one time. So was Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa. We both declined. went down to Wall Street today-to visit Isadore's large family, the Raspberries. I was invited to become a Raspberry at one time. So was Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa. We both declined.

Yes, and I took a walk of my own-up to the baby's pyramid at Broadway and Forty-second, then across Forty-third Street to the old Daffodil Club, to what had been the Century a.s.sociation before that; and then eastward across Forty-eighth Street to the townhouse which was slave quarters for Vera's farm, which at one time had been my parent's home.

I encountered Vera herself on the steps of the townhouse. Her slaves were all over in what used to be United Nations Park, planting watermelons and corn and sunflowers. I could hear them singing "Ol' Man River." They were so happy all the time. They considered themselves very lucky to be slaves.

They were all Chipmunk-5's, and about two-thirds of them were former Raspberries. People who wished to become slaves of Vera had to change their middle names to Chipmunk-5.

Hi ho.

Vera usually labored right along with her slaves. She loved hard work. But now I caught her tinkering idly with a beautiful Zeiss microscope, which one of her slaves had unearthed in the ruins of a hospital only the day before. It had been protected all through the years by its original factory packing case.

Vera had not sensed my approach. She was peering into the instrument and turning k.n.o.bs with childlike seriousness and inept.i.tude. It was obvious that she had never used a microscope before.

I stole closer to her, and then I said, "Boo!"

She jerked her head away from the eyepiece.

"h.e.l.lo," I said.

"You scared me to death," she said.

"Sorry," I said, and I laughed.

These ancient games go on and on. It's nice they do.

"I can't see anything," she said. She was complaining about the microscope.

"Just squiggly little animals that want to kill and eat us," I said. "You really want to see those?"

"I was looking at an opal," she said. She had draped an opal and diamond bracelet over the stage of the microscope. She had a collection of precious stones which would have been worth millions of dollars in olden times. People gave her all the jewels they found, just as they gave me all the candlesticks.

Jewels were useless. So were candlesticks, since there weren't such things on Manhattan as candles any more. People lit their homes at night with burning rags stuck in bowls of animal fat.

"There's probably Green Death on the opal," I said. "There's probably Green Death on everything."

The reason that we ourselves did not die of The Green Death, by the way, was that we took an antidote which was discovered by accident by Isadore's family, the Raspberries.

We had only to withhold the antidote from a troublemaker, or from an army of troublemakers, for that matter, and he or she or they would be exiled quickly to the afterlife, to The Turkey Farm.

There weren't any great scientists among the Raspberries, incidentally. They discovered the antidote through dumb luck. They ate fish without cleaning them, and the antidote, probably pollution left over from olden times, was somewhere in the guts of the fish they ate.

"Vera," I said, "if you ever got that microscope to work, you would see something that would break your heart."

"What would break my heart?" she said.

"You'd see the organisms that cause The Green Death," I said.

"Why would that make me cry?" she said.

"Because you're a woman of conscience," I said. "Don't you realize that we kill them by the trillions- trillions-every time we take our antidote?"

I laughed.