Slapstick, or Lonesome no more!

Kurt Vonnegut




"Call me but love, and I'll be new baptiz'd . . . "

- ROMEO


Dedicated to the memory of
Arthur Stanley Jefferson and Norvell Hardy
two angels of my time.


Prologue

THIS is the closest I will ever come to writing an autobiography. I
have called it "Slapstick" because it is grotesque, situational poetry
- like the slapstick film comedies, especially those of Laurel and
Hardy, of long ago. 

It is about what life feels like to me.

There are all these tests of my limited agility and intelligence. They
go on and on.

The fundamental joke with Laurel and Hardy, it seems to me, was that
they did their best with every test.

They never failed to bargain in good faith with their destinies, and
were screamingly adorable and funny on that account.
	

There was very little love in their films. There was often the
situational poetry of marriage, which was something else again. It was
yet another test - with comical possibilities, provided that everybody
submitted to it in good faith.

Love was never at issue. And, perhaps because I was so perpetually
intoxicated and instructed by Laurel and Hardy during my childhood in
the Great Depression, I find it natural to discuss life without ever
mentioning love.

It does not seem important to me.

What does seem important? Bargaining in good faith with destiny.



I have had some experiences with love, or think I have, anyway,
although the ones I have liked best could easily be described as
"common decency." I treated somebody well for a little while, or maybe
even for a tremendously long time, and that person treated me well in
turn. Love need not have had anything to do with it.

Also: I cannot distinguish between the love I have for people and the
love I have for dogs.

When a child, and not watching comedians on film or listening to
comedians on the radio, I used to spend a lot of time rolling around
on rugs with uncritically affectionate dogs we had.

And I still do a lot of that. The dogs become tired and confused and
embarrassed long before I do. I could go on forever.

Hi ho.
	

One time, on his twenty-first birthday, one of my three adopted sons,
who was about to leave for the Peace Corps in the Amazon Rain Forest,
said to me, "You know - you've never hugged me."

So I hugged him. We hugged each other. It was very nice. It was like
rolling around on a rug with a Great Dane we used to have.

	

Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it,
and I think it can often be poisonous.

I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other
would say to each other, when they fight, "Please - a little less
love, and a little more common decency."


	

My longest experience with common decency, surely, has been with my
older brother, my only brother, Bernard, who is an atmospheric
scientist in the State University of New York at Albany.

He is a widower, raising two young sons all by himself. He does it
well. He has three grown-up sons besides.

We were given very different sorts of minds at birth. Bernard could
never be a writer. I could never be a scientist. And, since we make
our livings with our minds, we tend to think of them as gadgets -
separate from our awarenesses, from our central selves.



We have hugged each other maybe three or four times - on birthdays,
very likely, and clumsily. We have never hugged in moments of grief.



The minds we have been given enjoy the same sorts of jokes, at any
rate - Mark Twain stuff, Laurel and Hardy stuff.

They are equally disorderly, too.

Here is an anecdote about my brother, which, with minor variations,
could be told truthfully about me:

Bernard worked for the General Electric Research Laboratory in
Schenectady, New York, for a while, where he discovered that silver
iodide could precipitate certain sorts of clouds as snow or rain. His
laboratory was a sensational mess, however, where a clumsy stranger
could die in a thousand different ways, depending on where he
stumbled.

The company had a safety officer who nearly swooned when he saw this
jungle of deadfalls and snares and hair-trigger booby traps. He bawled
out my brother.

My brother said this to him, tapping his own forehead with his
fingertips: "If you think this laboratory is bad, you should see what
it's like in here."

And so on.


I told my brother one time that whenever I did repair work around the
house, I lost all my tools before I could finish the job.

"You're lucky," he said. "I always lose whatever I'm working on."

We laughed.


But, because of the sorts of minds we were given at birth, and in
spite of their disorderliness, Bernard and I belong to artificial
extended families which allow us to claim relatives all over the
world.

He is a brother to scientists everywhere. I am a brother to writers
everywhere.

This is amusing and comforting to both of us. It is nice. 

It is lucky, too, for human beings need all the relatives they can get
- as possible donors or receivers not necessarily of love, but of
common decency.



When we were children in Indianapolis, Indiana, it appeared that we
would always have an extended family of genuine relatives there. Our
parents and grandparents, after all, had grown up there with shoals of
siblings and cousins and uncles and aunts. Yes, and their relatives
were all cultivated and gentle and prosperous, and spoke German and
English gracefully.



They were all religious skeptics, by the way.



They might roam the wide world over when they were young, and often
have wonderful adventures. But they were all told sooner or later that
it was time for them to come home to Indianapolis, and to settle down.
They invariably obeyed - because they had so many relatives there.

There were good things to inherit, too, of course - sane businesses,
comfortable homes and faithful servants, growing mountains of china
and crystal and silverware, reputations for honest dealing, cottages
on Lake Maxinkuckee, along whose eastern shore my family once owned a
village of summer homes.

	

But the delight the family took in itself was permanently crippled, I
think, by the sudden American hatred for all things German which
unsheathed itself when this country entered the First World War, five
years before I was born.

Children in our family were no longer taught German. Neither were they
encouraged to admire German music or literature or art or science. My
brother and sister and I were raised as though Germany were as foreign
to us as Paraguay.

We were deprived of Europe, except for what we might learn of it at
school.

We lost thousands of years in a very short time - and then tens of
thousands of American dollars after that, and the summer cottages and
so on.

And our family became a lot less interesting, especially to itself.

So - by the time the Great Depression and a Second World War were
over, it was easy for my brother and my sister and me to wander away
from Indianapolis.

And, of all the relatives we left behind, not one could think of a
reason why we should come home again.

We didn't belong anywhere in particular any more. We were
interchangeable parts in the American machine.

	

Yes, and Indianapolis, which had once had a way of speaking English
all its own, and jokes and legends and poets and villains and heroes
all its own, and galleries for its own artists, had itself become an
interchangeable part in the American machine.

It was just another someplace where automobiles lived, with a symphony
orchestra and all. And a race track.

Hi ho.



My brother and I still go back for funerals, of course. We went back
last July for the funeral of our Uncle Alex Vonnegut, the younger
brother of our late father - almost the last of our old-style
relatives, of the native American patriots who did not fear God, and
who had souls that were European.

He was eighty-seven years old. He was childless. He was a graduate of
Harvard. He was a retired life insurance agent. He was a co-founder of
the Indianapolis Chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.



His obituary in the Indianapolis Star said that he himself was not an
alcoholic.

This denial was at least partly a nice-Nellyism from the past, I
think. He used to drink, I know, although alcohol never seriously
damaged his work or made him wild. And then he stopped cold. And he
surely must have introduced himself at meetings of A.A. as all members
must, with his name - followed by this brave confession: "I'm an
alcoholic."

Yes, and the paper's genteel denial of his ever having had trouble
with alcohol had the old-fashioned intent of preserving from taint all
the rest of us who had the same last name.

We would all have a harder time making good Indianapolis marriages or
getting good Indianapolis jobs, if it were known for certain that we
had had relatives who were once drunkards, or who, like my mother and
my son, had gone at least temporarily insane.

It was even a secret that my paternal grandmother died of cancer.

Think of that.



At any rate, if Uncle Alex, the atheist, found himself standing before
Saint Peter and the Pearly Gates after he died, I am certain he
introduced himself as follows:

"My name is Alex Vonnegut. I'm an alcoholic."

Good for him.



I will guess, too, that it was loneliness as much as it was a dread of
alcoholic poisoning which shepherded him into A.A. As his relatives
died off or wandered away, or simply became interchangeable parts in
the American machine, he went looking for new brothers and sisters and
nephews and nieces and uncles and aunts, and so on, which he found in
A.A.



When I was a child, he used to tell me what to read, and then make
sure I'd read it. It used to amuse him to take me on visits to
relatives I'd never known I had.

He told me one time that he had been an American spy in Baltimore
during the First World War, befriending German-Americans there. His
assignment was to detect enemy agents. He detected nothing, for there
was nothing to detect.

He told me, too, that he was an investigator of graft in New York City
for a little while - before his parents told him it was time to come
home and settle down. He uncovered a scandal involving large
expenditures for the maintenance of Grant's Tomb, which required very
little maintenance indeed.

Hi ho.



I received the news of his death over a white, push-button telephone
in my house in that part of Manhattan known as 'Turtle Bay." There was
a philodendron nearby.

I am still not clear how I got here. There are no turtles. There is no
bay.

Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater
for short periods, with my home on my back.



So I called my brother in Albany. He was about to turn sixty. I was
fifty-two.

We were certainly no spring chickens.

But Bernard still played the part of an older brother. It was he who
got us our seats on Trans World Airlines and our car at the
Indianapolis airport, and our double room with twin beds at a Ramada
Inn.

The funeral itself, like the funerals of our parents and of so many
other close relatives, was as blankly secular, as vacant of ideas
about God or the afterlife, or even about Indianapolis, as our Ramada
Inn.



So my brother and I strapped ourselves into a jet-propelled airplane
bound from New York City to Indianapolis. I sat on the aisle. Bernard
took the window seat, since he was an atmospheric scientist, since
clouds had so much more to say to him than they did to me.

We were both over six feet tall. We still had most of our hair, which
was brown. We had identical mustaches - duplicates of our late
father's mustache.

We were harmless looking. We were a couple of nice old Andy Gumps.

There was an empty seat between us, which was spooky poetry. It could
have been a seat for our sister Alice, whose age was halfway between
mine and Bernard's. She wasn't in that seat and on her way to her
beloved Uncle Alex's funeral, for she had died among strangers in New
Jersey, of cancer - at the age of forty-one.

"Soap opera!" she said to my brother and me one time, when discussing
her own impending death. She would be leaving four young boys behind,
without any mother.

"Slapstick," she said.

Hi ho.



She spent the last day of her life in a hospital. The doctors and
nurses said she could smoke and drink as much as she pleased, and eat
whatever she pleased.

My brother and I paid her a call. It was hard for her to breathe. She
had been as tall as we were at one time, which was very embarrassing
to her, since she was a woman. Her posture had always been bad,
because of her embarrassment. Now she had a posture like a question
mark.

She coughed. She laughed. She made a couple of jokes which I don't
remember now.

Then she sent us away. "Don't look back," she said.

So we didn't.

She died at about the same time of day that Uncle Alex died - an hour
or two after the sun went down.

And hers would have been an unremarkable death statistically, if it
were not for one detail, which was this: Her healthy husband, James
Carmalt Adams, the editor of a trade journal for purchasing agents,
which he put together in a cubicle on Wall Street, had died two
mornings before - on "The Brokers' Special," the only train in
American railroading history to hurl itself off an open drawbridge.

Think of that.



This really happened.



Bernard and I did not tell Alice about what had happened to her
husband, who was supposed to take charge of the children after she
died, but she found out about it anyway. An ambulatory female patient
gave her a copy of the New York Daily News. The front page headline
was about the dive of the train. Yes, and there was a list of the dead
and missing inside.

Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since
she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as
being anything but accidents in a very busy place.

Good for her.



Exhaustion, yes, and deep money worries, too, made her say toward the
end that she guessed that she wasn't really very good at life.

Then again: Neither were Laurel and Hardy.



My brother and I had already taken over her household. After she died,
her three oldest sons, who were between the ages of eight and
fourteen, held a meeting, which no grownups could attend. Then they
came out and asked that we honor their only two requirements: That
they remain together, and that they keep their two dogs. The youngest
child, who was not at the meeting, was a baby only a year old or so.

From then on, the three oldest were raised by me end my wife, Jane Cox
Vonnegut, along with our own three children, on Cape Cod. The baby,
who lived with us for a while, was adopted by a first cousin of their
father, who is now a judge in Birmingham, Alabama.

So be it.

The three oldest kept their dogs.



I remember now what one of her sons, who is named "Kurt" like my
father and me, asked me as we drove from New Jersey to Cape Cod with
the two dogs in back. He was about eight.

We were going from south to north, so where we were going was "up" to
him. There were just the two of us. His brothers had gone ahead.

"Are the kids up there nice?" he said.

"Yes, they are," I replied.

He is an airline pilot now.

They are all something other than children now.



One of them is a goat farmer on a mountaintop in Jamaica. He has made
come true a dream of our sister's: To live far from the madness of
cities, with animals for friends. He has no telephone or electricity.

He is desperately dependent on rainfall. He is a ruined man, if it
does not rain.



The two dogs have died of old age. I used to roll around with them on
rugs for hours on end, until they were all pooped out.



Yes, and our sister's sons are candid now about a creepy business
which used to worry them a lot: They cannot find their mother or their
father in their memories anywhere - not anywhere.

The goat farmer, whose name is James Carmalt Adams, Jr., said this
about it to me, tapping his forehead with his fingertips: "It isn't
the museum, it should be."

The museums in children's minds, I think, automatically empty
themselves in times of utmost horror - to protect the children from
eternal grief.



For my own part, though: It would have been catastrophic if I had
forgotten my sister at once. I had never told her so, but she was the
person I had always written for. She was the secret of whatever
artistic unity I had ever achieved. She was the secret of my
technique. Any creation which has any wholeness and harmoniousness, I
suspect, was made by an artist or inventor with an audience of one in
mind.

Yes, and she was nice enough, or Nature was nice enough, to allow me
to feel her presence for a number of years after she died - to let me
go on writing for her. But then she began to fade away, perhaps
because she had more important business elsewhere.

Be that as it may, she had vanished entirely as my audience by the
time Uncle Alex died.

So the seat between my brother and me on the airplane seemed
especially vacant to me. I filled it as best I could - with that
morning's issue of The New York Times.



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.

I asked them the other evening to name the three most important human
beings in history. They protested that the question made no sense to
them.

I insisted that they put their heads together anyway, and give me some
sort of answer, which they did. They were very sulky about the
exercise. It was painful to them.

They finally came up with an answer. Melody does most of the talking
for them, and this is what she said in all seriousness: "You, and
Jesus Christ, and Santa Claus."

Hi ho.



When I do not ask them questions, they are as happy as clams.



They hope to become slaves of Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa some day. That is
O.K. with me.














Chapter 2

AND I really will try to stop writing "Hi ho" all the time.

Hi ho.



I was born right here in New York City. I was not then a Daffodil. I
was christened Wilbur Rockefeller Swain.

I was not alone, moreover. I had a dizygotic twin, a female. She was
named Eliza Mellon Swain.

We were christened in a hospital rather than in a church, and we were
not surrounded by relatives and our parents' friends. The thing was:
Eliza and I were so ugly that our parents were ashamed.

We were monsters, and we were not expected to live very long. We had
six fingers on each little hand, and six toes on each little footsie.
We had supernumerary nipples as well - two of them apiece.

We were not mongolian idiots, although we had the coarse black hair
typical of mongoloids. We were something new. We were neanderthaloids.
We had the features of adult, fossil human beings even in infancy -
massive brow-ridges, sloping foreheads, and steamshovel jaws.



We were supposed to have no intelligence, and to die before we were
fourteen.

But I am still alive and kicking, thank you. And Eliza would be, too,
I'm certain, if she had not been killed at the age of fifty - in an
avalanche on the outskirts of the Chinese colony on the planet Mars.

Hi ho.



Our parents were two silly and pretty and very young people named
Caleb Mellon Swain and Letitia Vanderbilt Swain, n?e Rockefeller. They
were fabulously well-to-do, and descended from Americans who had all
but wrecked the planet with a form of Idiot's Delight - obsessively
turning money into power, and then power back into money again, and
then money back into power again.

But Caleb and Letitia were harmless themselves. Father was very good
at backgammon and so-so at color photography, they say. Mother was
active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People. Neither worked. Neither was a college graduate, though both
had tried.

They wrote and spoke nicely. They adored each other. They were humble
about having done so poorly in schools. They were kind.

And I cannot fault them for being shattered by having given birth to
monsters. Anyone would have been shattered by giving birth to Eliza
and me.



And Caleb and Letitia were at least as good at parenting as I was,
when my turn rolled around. I was wholly indifferent to my own
children, although they were normal in every way.

Perhaps I would have been more entertained by my children if they had
been monsters like Eliza and me.

Hi ho.



Young Caleb and Letitia were advised not to break their hearts and
risk their furniture by attempting to raise Eliza and me in Turtle
Bay. We were no more true relatives of theirs, their advisors said,
than baby crocodiles.

Caleb's and Letitia's response was humane. It was also expensive and
Gothic in the extreme. Our parents did not hide us in a private
hospital for cases such as ours. They entombed us instead in a spooky
old mansion which they had inherited - in the midst of two hundred
acres of apple trees on a mountaintop, near the hamlet of Galen,
Vermont.

No one had lived there for thirty years.



Carpenters and electricians and plumbers were brought in to turn it
into a sort of paradise for Eliza and me. Thick rubber padding was put
under all the wall-to-wall carpets, so we would not hurt ourselves in
case we fell. Our diningroom was lined with tile, and there were
drains in the floor, so we and the room could be hosed off after every
meal.

More important, perhaps, were two chain-link fences which went up.
They were topped with barbed wire. The first enclosed the orchard. The
second separated the mansion from the prying eyes of the workmen who
had to be let in through the first from time to time in order to look
after the apple trees.

Hi ho.



A staff was recruited from the neighborhood. There was a cook. There
were two cleaning women and a cleaning man. There were two practical
nurses who fed us and dressed us and undressed us and bathed us. The
one I remember best is Withers Witherspoon, a combination guard,
chauffeur and handyman.

His mother was a Withers. His father was a Witherspoon.



Yes, and these were simple country people, who, with the exception of
Withers Witherspoon, who had been a soldier, had never been outside
Vermont They had rarely ventured more than ten miles from Galen, for
that matter - and they were necessarily all related to one another, as
inbred as Eskimos.

They were of course distantly related to Eliza and me, too, since our
Vermont ancestors had once been content to dogpaddle endlessly, so to
speak, in the same tiny genetic pool.

But, in the American scheme of things at that time, they were related
to our family as carp were related to eagles, say - for our family had
evolved into worldtravelers and multimillionaires.

Hi ho.



Yes, and it was easy for our parents to buy the fealty of these living
fossils from the family past. They were given modest salaries which
seemed enormous to them, since the money-making lobes of their brains
were so primitive.

They were given pleasant apartments in the mansion, and color
television sets. They were encouraged to eat like emperors, charging
whatever they liked to our parents. They had very little work to do.

Better still, they did not have to think much for themselves. They
were placed under the command of a young general practitioner who
lived in the hamlet, Dr. Stewart Rawlings Mott, who would look in on
us every day.

Dr. Mott was a Texan, incidentally, a melancholy and private young
man. To this day, I do not know what induced him to move so far from
his people and his birthplace - to practice medicine in an Eskimo
settlement in Vermont.

As a curious footnote in history, and a probably meaningless one: The
grandson of Dr. Mott would become the King of Michigan during my
second term as President of the United States.

I must hiccup again: Hi ho.



I swear: If I live to complete this autobiography, I will go through
it again, and cross out all the "Hi ho's."

Hi ho.



Yes, and there was an automatic sprinkler system in the mansion - and
burglar alarms on the windows and doors and skylights.

When we grew older and uglier, and capable of breaking arms or tearing
heads off, a great gong was installed in the kitchen. This was
connected to cherry red push-buttons in every room and at regular
intervals down every corridor. The buttons glowed in the dark.

A button was to be pushed only if Eliza or I began to toy with murder.

Hi ho.














Chapter 3

FATHER went to Galen with a lawyer and a physician and an architect -
to oversee the refurbishing of the mansion for Eliza and me, and the
hiring of the servants and Dr. Mott Mother remained here in Manhattan,
in their townhouse in Turtle Bay.

Turtles in great profusion, incidentally, have returned to Turtle Bay.

Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa's slaves like to catch them for soup.

Hi ho.



It was one of the few occasions, except for Father's death, when
Mother and Father were separated for more than a day or two. And
Father wrote a graceful letter to Mother from Vermont, which I found
in Mother's bedside table after Mother died.

It may have been the whole of their correspondence by mail.

"My dearest Tish - " he wrote, "Our children will be very happy here.
We can be proud. Our architect can be proud. The workmen can be proud.

"However short our children's lives may be, we will have given them
the gifts of dignity and happiness. We have created a delightful
asteroid for them, a little world with only one mansion on it, and
otherwise covered with apple trees."



Then he returned to an asteroid of his own - in Turtle Bay. He and
Mother, thereafter, again on the advice of physicians, would visit us
once a year, and always on our birthday.

Their brownstone still stands, and it is still snug and weathertight.
It is there that our nearest neighbor, Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa, now
quarters her slaves.



"And when Eliza and Wilbur die and go to Heaven at last," our father's
letter went on, "we can lay them to rest among their Swain ancestors,
in the private family cemetery out under the apple trees."

Hi ho.



As for who was already buried in that cemetery, which was separated
from the mansion by a fence: They were mostly Vermont apple farmers
and their mates and offspring, people of no distinction. Many of them
were no doubt nearly as illiterate and ignorant as Melody and Isadore.

That is to say: They were innocent great apes, with limited means for
doing mischief, which, in my opinion as an old, old man, is all that
human beings were ever meant to be.



Many of the tombstones in the cemetery had sunk out of sight or
capsized. Weather had dimmed the epitaphs of those which still stood.

But there was one tremendous monument, with thick granite walls, a
slate roof, and great doors, which would clearly last past Judgment
Day. It was the mausoleum of the founder of the family's fortune and
the builder of our mansion, Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.



Professor Swain was by far the most intelligent of all our known
ancestors, I would say - Rockefellers, Du Ponts, Mellons, Vanderbilts,
Dodges and all. He took a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology at the age of eighteen, and went on to setup the Department
of Civil Engineering at Cornell University at the age of twenty-two.
By that time, he already had several important patents on railroad
bridges and safety devices, which alone would soon have made him a
millionaire.

But he was not content. So he created the Swain Bridge Company, which
designed and supervised the construction of half the railroad bridges
in the entire planet.



He was a citizen of the world. He spoke many languages, and was the
personal friend of many heads of state. But when it came time to build
a palace of his own, he placed it among his ignorant ancestors' apple
trees.

And he was the only person who loved that barbarous pile until Eliza
and I came along. We were so happy there!



And Eliza and I shared a secret with Professor Swain, even though he
had been dead for half a century. The servants did not know it. Our
parents did not know it. And the workmen who refurbished the place
never suspected it, apparently, although they must have punched pipes
and wires and heating ducts through all sorts of puzzling spaces.

This was the secret: There was a mansion concealed within the mansion.
It could be entered through trap doors and sliding panels. It
consisted of secret staircases and listening posts with peepholes, and
secret passageways. There were tunnels, too.

It was actually possible for Eliza and me, for example, to vanish into
a huge grandfather clock in the ballroom at the top of the
northernmost tower, and to emerge almost a kilometer away - through a
trap door in the floor of the mausoleum of Professor Elihu Roosevelt
Swain.



We shared another secret with the Professor, too - which we learned
from going through some of his papers in the mansion. His middle name
hadn't actually been Roosevelt. He had given himself that middle name
in order to seem more aristocratic when he enrolled as a student at
M.I.T.

His name on his baptismal certificate was Elihu Witherspoon Swain.

It was from his example, I suppose, that Eliza and I got the idea,
eventually, of giving simply everybody new middle names.














Chapter 4

WHEN Professor Swain died, he was so fat that I do not see how he
could have fitted into any of his secret passageways. They were very
narrow. Eliza and I were able to fit into them, however, even when we
were two meters tall - because the ceilings were so high -

Yes, and Professor Swain died of his fatness in the mansion, at a
dinner he gave in honor of Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Thomas Alva
Edison.

Those were the days.

Eliza and I found the menu. It began with turtle soup.



Our servants would tell each other now and then that the mansion was
haunted. They heard sneezing and cackling in the walls, and the
creaking of stairways where there were no stairways, and the opening
and shutting of doors where there were no doors.

Hi ho.



It would be exciting for me to cry out, as a crazed old centenarian in
the ruins of Manhattan, that Eliza and I were subjected to acts of
unspeakable cruelty in that spooky old house. But we may have in fact
been the two happiest children that history has so far known.

That ecstasy would not end until our fifteenth year.

Think of that.

Yes, and when I became a pediatrician, practicing rural medicine in
the mansion where I was raised, I often told myself about this
childish patient or that one, remembering my own childhood: "This
person has just arrived on this planet, knows nothing about it, has no
standards by which to judge it. This person does not care what it
becomes. It is eager to become absolutely anything it is supposed to
be."

That surely describes the state of mind of Eliza and me, when we were
very young. And all the information we received about the planet we
were on indicated that idiots were lovely things to be.

So we cultivated idiocy.

We refused to speak coherently in public. "Bun," and, "Duh," we said.
We drooled and rolled our eyes. We farted and laughed. We ate library
paste.

Hi ho.



Consider: We were at the center of the lives of those who cared for
us. They could be heroically Christian in their own eyes only if Eliza
and I remained helpless and vile. If we became openly wise and
self-reliant, they would become our drab and inferior assistants. If
we became capable of going out into the world, they might lose their
apartments, their color televisions, their illusions of being sorts of
doctors and nurses, and their high-paying jobs.

So, from the very first, and without quite knowing what they were
doing, I am sure, they begged us a thousand times a. day to go on
being helpless and vile. There was only one small advancement they
wished us to make up the ladder of human achievements. They hoped with
all their hearts that we would become toilet-trained.

Again: We were glad to comply.



But we could secretly read and write English by the time we were four.
We could read and write French, German, Italian, Latin and ancient
Greek by the we were seven, and do calculus, too.

There were thousands of books in the mansion. By the time we were ten,
we had read them all by candlelight, at naptime or after bedtime - in
secret passageways, or often in the mausoleum of Elihu Roosevelt
Swain.



But we continued to drool and babble and so on, whenever grownups were
around. It was fun.

We did not itch to display our intelligence in public. We did not
think of intelligence as being useful or attractive in any way. We
thought of it as being simply one more example of our freakishness,
like our extra nipples and fingers and toes.

And we may have been right at that. You know?

Hi ho.














Chapter 5

AND meanwhile the strange young Dr.  Stewart Rawlings Mott weighed us
and measured us, and peered into our orifices, and took samples of our
urine - day after day after day.

"How is everybody today?" he would say.

We would tell him "Bluh" and "Duh," and so on. We called him "Flocka
Butt."

And we ourselves did all we could to make each day exactly like the
one before. Whenever "Flocka Butt" congratulated us on our healthy
appetites and regular bowel movements, for example, I would invariably
stick my thumbs in my ears and waggle my fingers, and Eliza would
hoist her skirt and snap the elastic at the waist of her pantyhose.

Eliza and I believed then what I believe even now: That life can be
painless, provided that there is sufficient peacefulness for a dozen
or so rituals to be repeated simply endlessly.

Life, ideally, I think, should be like the Minuet or the Virginia Reel
or the Turkey Trot, something easily mastered in a dancing school.



 I teeter even now between thinking that Dr. Mott loved Eliza and me,
and knew how smart we were, and wished to protect us from the
cruelties of the outside world, and thinking that he was comatose.

After Mother died, I discovered that the linen chest at the foot of
her bed was crammed with packets of Dr. Mott's bi-weekly reports on
the health of Eliza and me. He told of the ever-greater quantities of
food being consumed and then excreted. He spoke, too, of our
unflagging cheerfulness, and our natural resistance to common diseases
of childhood.

The sorts of things he reported, in fact, were the sorts of things a
carpenter's helper would have had no trouble detecting - such as that,
at the age of nine, Eliza and I were over two meters tall.

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.

We said it was possible that the framers of the Constitution were
blind to the beauty of persons who were without great wealth or
powerful friends or public office, but who were nonetheless genuinely
strong.

We thought it was more likely, though, that the framers had not
noticed that it was natural, and therefore almost inevitable, that
human beings in extraordinary and enduring situations should think of
themselves as composing new families. Eliza and I pointed out that
this happened no less in democracies than in tyrannies, since human
beings were the same the wide world over, and civilized only
yesterday.

Elected representatives, hence, could be expected to become members of
the famous and powerful family of elected representatives - which
would, perfectly naturally, make them wary and squeamish and stingy
with respect to all the other sorts of families which, again,
perfectly naturally, subdivided mankind.

Eliza and I, thinking as halves of a single genius, proposed that the
Constitution be amended so as to guarantee that every citizen, no
matter how humble or crazy or incompetent or deformed, somehow be
given membership in some family as covertly xenophobic and crafty as
the one their public servants formed.

Good for Eliza and me!

Hi ho.














Chapter 7

HOW nice it would have been, especially for Eliza, since she was a
girl, if we had been ugly ducklings - if we had become beautiful by
and by. But we simply grew more preposterous with each passing day.

There were a few advantages to being a male 2 meters tall. I was
respected as a basketball player at prep school and college, even
though I had very narrow shoulders and a voice like a piccolo, and not
the first hints of a beard or pubic hair. Yes, and later on, after my
voice had deepened and I ran as a candidate for Senator from Vermont,
I was able to say on my billboards, "It takes a Big Man to do a Big
Job!"

But Eliza, who was exactly as tall as I was, could not expect to be
welcomed anywhere. There was no conceivable conventional role for a
female which could be bent so as to accommodate a twelve-fingered,
twelve-toed, four-breasted, Neanderthaloid half-genius - weighing one
quintal, and two meters tall.



Even as little children we knew we weren't ever going to win any
beauty contests.

Eliza said something prophetic about that, incidentally. She couldn't
have been more than eight. She said that maybe she could win a beauty
contest on Mars.

She was, of course, destined to die on Mars.

Eliza's beauty prize there would be an avalanche of iron pyrite,
better known as "Fool's Gold."

Hi ho.



There was a time in our childhood when we actually agreed that we were
lucky not to be beautiful. We knew from all the romantic novels I'd
read out loud in my squeaky voice, often with gestures, that beautiful
people had their privacy destroyed by passionate strangers.

We didn't want that to happen to us, since the two of us alone
composed not only a single mind but a thoroughly populated Universe.



This much I must say about our appearance, at least: Our clothing was
the finest that money could buy. Our astonishing dimensions, which
changed radically almost from month to month, were mailed off
regularly, in accordance with our parents' instructions, to some of
the finest tailors and cobblers and dressmakers and shirtmakers and
haberdashers in the world.

The practical nurses who dressed and undressed us took a childish
delight, even though we never went anywhere, in costuming us for
imaginary social events for millionaires - for tea dances, for horse
shows, for skiing vacations, for attending classes at expensive prep
schools, for an evening of theater here in Manhattan and a supper
afterwards with lots of champagne.

And so on.

Hi ho.



We were aware of all the comedy in this. But, as brilliant as we were
when we put our heads together, we did not guess until we were fifteen
that we were also in the midst of a tragedy. We thought that ugliness
was simply amusing to people in the outside world. We did not realize
that we could actually nauseate strangers who came upon us
unexpectedly.

We were so innocent as to the importance of good looks, in fact, that
we could see little point to the story of "The Ugly Duckling," which I
read out loud to Eliza one day - in the mausoleum of Professor Elihu
Roosevelt Swain.

The story, of course, was about a baby bird that was raised by ducks,
who thought it was the funniestlooking duck they had ever seen. But
then it turned out to be a swan when it grew up.

Eliza, I remember, said she thought it would have been a much better
story if the little bird had waddled up on shore and turned into a
rhinoceros.

Hi ho.














Chapter 8

UNTIL  the eve of our fifteenth birthday, Eliza and I never heard
anything bad about ourselves when we eavesdropped from the secret
passageways.

The servants were so used to us that they hardly ever mentioned us,
even in moments of deepest privacy. Dr. Mott seldom commented on
anything but our appetites and our excretions. And our parents were so
sickened by us that they were tongue-tied when they made their annual
space voyage to our asteroid. Father, I remember, would talk to Mother
rather haltingly and listlessly about world events he had read about
in news magazines.

They would bring us toys from F.A.O. Schwarz - guaranteed by that
emporium to be educational for three-year-olds.

Hi ho.



Yes, and I think now about all the secrets about the human condition I
withhold from young Melody and Isadore, for their own peace of mind -
the fact that the human afterlife is no good, and so on.

And then I am awed yet again by the perfect Lulu of a secret that was
concealed from Eliza and me so long: That our own parents wished we
would hurry up and die.



We imagined lazily that our fifteenth birthday would be like all the
rest. We put on the show we had always put on. Our parents arrived at
our suppertime, which was four in the afternoon. We would get our
presents the next day.

We threw food at each other in our tile-lined diningroom. I hit Eliza
with an avocado. She hit me with a filet mignon. We bounced Parker
House rolls off the maid. We pretended not to know that our parents
had arrived and were watching us through a crack in the door.

Yes, and then, still not having greeted our parents face-to-face, we
were bathed and talcumed, and dressed in our pajamas and bathrobes and
bedroom slippers. Bedtime was at five, for Eliza and I pretended to
sleep sixteen hours a day.

Our practical nurses, who were Oveta Cooper and Mary Selwyn Kirk, told
us that there was a wonderful surprise waiting for us in the library.

We pretended to be gaga about what that surprise could possibly be.

We were full-grown giants by then.

I carried a rubber tugboat, which was supposedly my favorite toy.
Eliza had a red velvet ribbon in the mare's nest of her coal black
hair.



As always, there was a large coffee table between Eliza and me and our
parents when we were brought in. As always, our parents had brandy to
sip. As always, there was a fizzing, popping blaze of pine and sappy
apple logs in the fireplace. As always, an oil painting of Professor
Elihu Roosevelt Swain over the mantelpiece beamed down on the ritual
scene.

As always, our parents stood. They smiled up at us with what we still
did not recognize as bittersweet dread.

As always, we pretended to find them adorable, but not to remember who
they were at first.



 As always, Father did the talking.

"How do you do, Eliza and Wilbur?" he said. "You are looking very
well. We are very glad to see you. Do you remember who we are?"

Eliza and I consulted with one another uneasily, drooling, and
murmuring in ancient Greek. Eliza said to me in Greek, I remember,
that she could not believe that we were related to such pretty dolls.

Father helped us out. He told us the name we had given to him years
ago. "I am Bluth-luh," he said.

Eliza and I pretended to be flabbergasted. "Bluthluh!" we told each
other. We could not believe our good fortune. "Bluth-luhl Bluth-luh!"
we cried.

"And this," said Father, indicating Mother, "is Mub-lub."

This was even more sensational news to Eliza and me. "Mub-lub!
Mub-lub!" we exclaimed.

And now Eliza and I made a great intellectual leap, as always. Without
any hints from anybody, we concluded that, if our parents were in the
house, then our birthday must be close at hand. We chanted our idiot
word for birthday, which was "Fuff-bay."

As always, we pretended to become overexcited. We jumped up and down.
We were so big by then that the floor began to go up and down like a
trampoline.

But we suddenly stopped, pretending, as always, to have been rendered
catatonic by more happiness than was good for us.

That was always the end of the show. After that, we were led away.

Hi ho.














Chapter 9

WE were put into custom-made cribs - in separate but adjacent
bedrooms. The rooms were connected by a secret panel in the wall. The
cribs were as big as railroad flatcars. They made a terrible clatter
when their sides were raised.

Eliza and I pretended to fall asleep at once. After a half an hour,
however, we were reunited in Eliza's room. The servants never looked
in on us. Our health was perfect, after all, and we had established a
reputation for being, as they said, " . . . as good as gold at
bedtime."

Yes, and we went through a trapdoor under Eliza's crib, and were soon
taking turns watching our parents in the library - through a tiny hole
we ourselves had drilled through the wall, and through the upper
corner of the frame around the painting of Professor Elihu Roosevelt
Swain.

	

Father was telling mother of a thing he had read in a news magazine on
the day before. It seemed that scientists in the People's Republic of
China were experimenting with making human beings smaller, so they
would not need to eat so much and wear such big clothes.

Mother was staring into the fire. Father had to tell her twice about
the Chinese rumor. The second time he did it, she replied emptily that
she supposed that the Chinese could accomplish just about anything
they put their minds to.

Only about a month before, the Chinese had sent two hundred explorers
to Mars - without using a space vehicle of any kind.

No scientist in the Western World could guess how the trick was done.
The Chinese themselves volunteered no details.



Mother said that it seemed like such a long time since Americans had
discovered anything. "All of a sudden," she said, "everything is being
discovered by the Chinese."



"We used to discover everything," she said.



It was such a stupefied conversation. The level of animation was so
low that our beautiful young parents from Manhattan might have been up
to their necks in honey. They appeared, as they had always appeared to
Eliza and me, to be under some curse which required them to speak only
of matters which did not interest them at all.

And indeed they were under a malediction. But Eliza and I had not
guessed-its nature: That they were all but strangled and paralyzed by
the wish that their own children would die.

And I promise this about our parents, although the only proof I have
is a feeling in my bones: Neither one had ever suggested in any way to
the other that he or she wished we would die.

Hi ho.



But then there was a bang in the fireplace. Steam had to escape from a
trap in a sappy log.

Yes, and Mother, because she was a symphony of chemical reactions like
all other living things, gave a terrified shriek. Her chemicals
insisted that she shriek in response to the bang.

After the chemicals got her to do that, though, they wanted a lot more
from her. They thought it was high time she said what she really felt
about Eliza and me, which she did. All sorts of other things went
haywire when she said it. Her hands closed convulsively. Her spine
buckled and her face shriveled to turn her into an old, old witch.

"I hate them, I hate them, I hate them," she said.



And not many seconds passed before Mother said with spitting
explicitness who it was she hated.

"I hate Wilbur Rockefeller Swain and Eliza Mellon Swain," she said.














Chapter 10

MOTHER was temporarily insane that night.

I got to know her well in later years. And, while I never learned to
love her, or to love anyone, for that matter, I did admire her
unwavering decency toward one and all. She was not a mistress of
insults. When she spoke either in public or in private, no reputations
died.

So it was not truly our mother who said on the eve of our fifteenth
birthday, "How can I love Count Dracula and his blushing bride?" -
meaning Eliza and me.

It was not truly our mother who asked our father, "How on Earth did I
ever give birth to a pair of drooling totem poles?"

And so on.



As for Father: He engulfed her in his arms. He was weeping with love
and pity.

"Caleb, oh Caleb - " she said in his arms, "this isn't me."

"Of course not," he said.

"Forgive me," she said.

"Of course," he said.

"Will God ever forgive me?" she said.

"He already has," he said.

"It was as though a devil all of a sudden got inside of me," she said.

"That's what it was, Tish," he said.

Her madness was subsiding now. "Oh, Caleb - " she said.



Lest I seem to be fishing for sympathy, let me say right now that
Eliza and I in those days were about as emotionally vulnerable as the
Great Stone Face in New Hampshire.

We needed a mother's and father's love about as much as a fish needs a
bicycle, as the saying goes.

So when our mother spoke badly of us, even wished we would die, our
response was intellectual. We enjoyed solving problems. Perhaps
Mother's problem was one we could solve - short of suicide, of course.

She pulled herself together again eventually. She steeled herself for
another hundred birthdays with Eliza and me, in case God wished to
test her in that way. But, before she did that, she said this:

"I would give anything, Caleb, for the faintest sign of intelligence,
the merest flicker of humanness in the eyes of either twin."



This was easily arranged.

Hi ho.



So Eliza and I went back to Eliza's room, and we painted a big sign on
a bedsheet. Then, after our parents were sound asleep, we stole into
their room through the false back in an armoire. We hung the sign on
the wall, so it would be the first thing they saw when they woke up.

This is what it said:

DEAR MATER AND PATER: WE CAN NEVER BE PRETTY BUT WE CAN BE AS SMART OR
AS DUMB AS THE WORLD REALLY WANTS US TO BE.  YOUR FAITHFUL SERVANTS,
ELIZA MELLON SWAIN WILBUR ROCKEFELLER SWAIN

Hi ho.














Chapter 11

THUS did Eliza and I destroy our Paradise - our nation of two.



We arose the next morning before our parents did, before the servants
could come to dress us. We sensed no danger. We supposed ourselves
still to be in Paradise as we dressed ourselves.

I chose to wear a conservative blue, pinstripe, three-piece suit, I
remember. Eliza chose to wear a cashmere sweater, a tweed skirt, and
pearls.

We agreed that Eliza should be our spokesman at first, since she had a
rich alto voice. My voice did not have the authority to announce
calmingly but convincingly that, in effect, the world had just turned
upside down.

Remember, please, that almost all that anyone had ever heard us say up
to then was "Buh" and "Duh," and so on.

Now we encountered Oveta Cooper, our practical nurse, in the
colonnaded green marble foyer. She was startled to see us up and
dressed.

Before she could comment on this, though, Eliza and I leaned our heads
together, put them in actual contact, just above our ears. The single
genius we composed thereby then spoke to Oveta in Eliza's voice, which
was as lovely as a viola.

This is what that voice said:

"Good morning, Oveta. A new life begins for all of us today. As you
can see and hear, Wilbur and I are no longer idiots. A miracle has
taken place overnight. Our parents' dreams have come true. We are
healed.

"As for you, Oveta: You will keep your apartment and your color
television, and perhaps even receive a salary increase - as a reward
for all you did to make this miracle come to pass. No one on the staff
will experience any change, except for this one: Life here will become
even easier and more pleasant than it was before."

Oveta, a bleak, Yankee dumpling, was hypnotized - like a rabbit who
has met a rattlesnake. But Eliza and I were not a rattlesnake. With
our heads together, we were one of the gentlest geniuses the world has
ever known.



"We will not be using the tiled diningroom any more," said Eliza's
voice. "We have lovely manners, as you shall see. Please have our
breakfast served in the solarium, and notify us when Mater and Pater
are up and around. It would be very nice if, from now on, you would
address my brother and me as 'Master Wilbur' and 'Mistress Eliza.'

"You may go now, and tell the others about the miracle."

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 sleepy-head!"

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. "Bluth-luh!" 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.

Melody sometimes looks to me like a merry old Chinese woman, although
she is only sixteen. A pregnant girl who looks like that is a sad
thing for a pediatrician to see.

But the love that the robust and rosy Isadore gives her
counterbalances my sadness with joy. Lake almost all the members of
his family, the Raspberries, Isadore has nearly all his teeth, and
remains upright even when the gravity is most severe. He carries
Melody around in his arms on days like that, and has offered to carry
me.

The Raspberries are food-gatherers, mainly, living in and around the
ruins of the New York Stock Exchange. They fish off docks. They mine
for canned goods. They pick fruits and berries they find. They grow
their own tomatoes and potatoes, and radishes, and little more.

They trap rats and bats and dogs and cats and birds, and eat them. A
Raspberry will eat anything.














Chapter 14

Iwish Melody what our parents once wished Eliza and me: A short but
happy life on an asteroid.

Hi ho.



Yes, and I have already said, Eliza and I might have had a long and
happy life on an asteroid, if we had not showed off our intelligence
one day. We might have been in the mansion still, burning the trees
and the furniture and the bannisters and the paneling for warmth, and
drooling and babbling when strangers came.

We could have raised chickens. We could have had a little vegetable
garden. And we could have amused ourselves with our ever-increasing
wisdom, caring nothing for its possible usefulness.



The sun is going down. Thin clouds of bats stream out from the subway
- jittering, squeaking, dispersing like gas. As always, I shudder.

I can't think of their noise as a noise. It is a disease of silence
instead.



I write on - in the light of a burning rag in a bowl of animal fat.

I have a thousand candlesticks, but no candles.

Melody and Isadore play backgammon - on a board I painted on the lobby
floor.

They double and redouble each other, and laugh,



They are planning a party for my one hundred and first birthday, which
is a month away.

I eavesdrop on them sometimes. Old habits are hard to break. Vera
Chipmunk-5 Zappa is making new costumes for the occasion - for herself
and her slaves. She has mountains of cloth in her storeroom in Turtle
Bay. The slaves will wear pink pantaloons and golden slippers, and
green silk turbans with ostrich feather plumes, I heard Melody say.

Vera will be borne to the party in a sedan chair, I've heard,
surrounded by slaves carrying presents and food and drink and torches,
and frightening away wild dogs with the clangor of dinnerbells.

Hi ho.



I must be very careful with my drinking at my birthday party. If I
drank too much, I might spill the beans to everybody: That the life
that awaits us after death is infinitely more tiresome than this one.

Hi ho.














Chapter 15

ELIZA and I were of course not allowed to return to consolations of
idiocy. We were bawled out severely whenever we tried. Yes, and the
servants and our parents found one byproduct of our metamorphosis
positively delicious: They were suddenly entitled to bawl us out.

What hell we caught from time to time!



Yes, and Dr. Mott was fired, and all sorts of experts were brought in.

It was fun for a while. The first doctors to arrive were specialists
in hearts and lungs and kidneys and so on. When they studied us organ
by organ and body fluid by body fluid, we were masterpieces of health.

They were genial. They were all family employees in a way. They were
research people whose work was financed by the Swain Foundation in New
York. That was how they had been so easily rounded up and brought to
Galen. The family had helped them. Now they would help the family.

They joshed us a lot One of them, I remember, said to me that it must
be fun to be so tall. "What's the weather up there like?" he said, and
so on.

The joshing had a soothing effect. It gave us the mistaken impression
that it did not matter how ugly we were. I still remember what an ear,
nose and throat specialist said when he looked up into Eliza's
enormous sinus cavities with a flashlight. "My God, nurse - " he said,
"call up the National Geographic Society. We have just discovered a
new entrance to Mammoth Cave!"

Eliza laughed. The nurse laughed. I laughed. We all laughed.

Our parents were in another part of the mansion. They kept away from
all the fun.



That early in the game, though, we had our first disturbing tastes of
separation. Some of the examinations required that we be several rooms
apart As the distance between Eliza and me increased, I felt as though
my head were turning to wood.

I became stupid and insecure.

When I was reunited with Eliza, she said that she had felt very much
the same sort of thing. "It was as though my skull was filling up with
maple syrup," she said.

And we bravely tried to be amused rather than frightened by the
listless children we became when we were parted. We pretended they had
nothing to do with us, and we made up names for them. We called them
"Betty and Bobby Brown."



And now is as good a time as any, I think, to say that when we read
Eliza's will, after her death in a Martian avalanche, we learned that
she wished to be buried wherever she died. Her grave was to be marked
with a simple stone, engraved with this information and nothing more:

[graphic of a tombstone with the words "Here Lies Betty Brown"]



Yes, and it was the last specialist to look us over, a psychologist,
Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner, who decreed that Eliza and I should be
separated permanently, should, so to speak, become forever Betty and
Bobby Brown.














Chapter 16

F?DOR Mikhailovich Dostoevski, the Russian novelist, said one time
that, "One sacred memory from childhood is perhaps the best
education." I can think of another quickie education for a child,
which, in its way, is almost as salutary: Meeting a human being who is
tremendously respected by the adult world, and realizing that that
person is actually a malicious lunatic.

That was Eliza's and my experience with Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner,
who was widely believed to be the greatest expert on psychological
testing in the world - with the possible exception of China. Nobody
knew what was going on in China any more.



I have an Encyclopaedia Britannica here in the lobby of the Empire
State Building, which is the reason I am able to give Dostoevski his
middle name.



Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner was invariably impressive and gracious
when in the presence of grownups. She was elaborately dressed the
whole tune she was in the mansion - in high-heeled shoes and fancy
dresses and jewelry.

We heard her tell our parents one time: "Just because a woman has
three doctors' degrees and heads a testing corporation which bills
three million dollars a year, that doesn't mean she can't be
feminine."

When she got Eliza and me alone, though, she seethed with paranoia.

"None of your tricks, no more of your snotty little kid millionaire
tricks with me," she would say.

And Eliza and I hadn't done anything wrong.



She was so enraged by how much money and power our family had, and so
sick, that I don't think she even noticed how huge and ugly Eliza and
I were. We were just two more rotten-spoiled little rich kids to her.

"I wasn't born with any silver spoon in my mouth," she told us, not
once but many times. "Many was the day we didn't know where the next
meal was coming from," she said. "Have you any idea what that's like?"

"No," said Eliza.

"Of course not," said Dr. Cordiner.

And so on.



Since she was paranoid, it was especially unfortunate that her middle
name was the same as our last name.

"I'm not your sweet Aunt Cordelia," she would say. "You needn't worry
your little aristocratic brains about that. When my grandfather came
from Poland, he changed his name from Stankowitz to Swain." Her eyes
were blazing. "Say 'Stankowitz!' "

We said it.

"Now say 'Swain,' " she said.

We did.



And finally one of us asked her what she was so mad about.

This made her very calm. "I am not mad," she said. "It would be very
unprofessional for me to ever get mad about anything. However, let me
say that asking a person of my calibre to come all this distance into
the wilderness to personally administer tests to only two children is
like asking Mozart to tune a piano. It is like asking Albert Einstein
to balance a checkbook. Am I getting through to you, 'Mistress Eliza
and Master Wilbur,' as I believe you are called?"

"Then why did you come?" I asked her.

Her rage came out into the open again. She said this to me with all
possible nastiness: "Because money talks, 'Little Lord Fauntleroy.' "



 We were further shocked when we learned that she meant to administer
tests to us separately. We said innocently that we would get many more
correct answers if we were allowed to put our heads together.

She became a tower of irony. "Why, of course, Master and Mistress,"
she said. "And wouldn't you like to have an encyclopaedia in the room
with you, too, and maybe the faculty of Harvard University, to tell
you the answers, in case you're not sure?"

"That would be nice," we said.

"In case nobody has told you," she said, "this is the United States of
America, where nobody has a right to rely on anybody else - where
everybody learns to make his or her own way.

"I'm here to test you," she said, "but there's a basic rule for life
I'd like to teach you, too, and you'll thank me for it in years to
come."

This was the lesson: "Paddle your own canoe," she said. "Can you say
that and remember it?"

Not only could I say it, but I remember it to this day: "Paddle your
own canoe."

Hi ho.



So we paddled our own canoes. We were tested as individuals at the
stainless steel table in the tile-lined diningroom. When one of us was
in there with Dr. Cordiner, with "Aunt Cordelia," as we came to call
her in private, the other one was taken as for away as possible - to
the ballroom at the top of the tower at the north end of the mansion.

Withers Witherspoon had the job of watching whichever one of us was in
the ballroom. He was chosen for the job because he had been a soldier
at one time. We heard "Aunt Cordelia's" instructions to him. She asked
him to be alert to clues that Eliza and I were communicating
telepathically.

Western science, with a few clues from the Chinese, had at last
acknowledged that some people could communicate with certain others
without visible or audible signals. The transmitters and receivers for
such spooky messages were on the surfaces of sinus cavities, and those
cavities had to be healthy and clear of obstructions.

The chief clue which the Chinese gave the West was this puzzling
sentence, delivered in English, which took years to decipher: "I feel
so lonesome when I get hay fever or a cold."

Hi ho.



Well, mental telepathy was useless to Eliza and me over distances
greater than three meters. With one K of us in the diningroom, and the
other in the ballroom, our bodies might as well have been on different
planets - which is in fact their condition today.

Oh, sure - and I could take written examinations, but Eliza could not.
When "Aunt Cordelia" tested Eliza, she had to read each question out
loud to her, and then write down her answer.

And it seemed to us that we missed absolutely every question. But we
must have answered a few correctly, for Dr. Cordiner reported to our
parents that our intelligence was " . . . low normal for their age."

She said further, not knowing that we were eavesdropping, that Eliza
would probably never learn to read or write, and hence could never be
a voter or hold a driver's license. She tried to soften this some by
observing that Eliza was " . . . quite an amusing chatterbox."

She said that I was " . . . a good boy, a serious boy - easily
distracted by his scatter-brained sister. He reads and writes, but has
a poor comprehension of the meanings of words and sentences. If he
were separated from his sister, there is every reason to believe that
he could become a fillingstation attendant or a janitor in a village
school. His prospects for a happy and useful life in a rural area are
fair to good."



The People's Republic of China was at that very moment secretly
creating literally millions upon millions of geniuses - by teaching
pairs or small groups of congenial, telepathically compatible
specialists to think as single minds. And those patchwork minds were
the equals of Sir Isaac Newton's or William Shakespeare's, say.

Oh, yes - and long before I became President of the United States of
America, the Chinese had begun to combine those synthetic minds into
intellects so flabbergasting that the Universe itself seemed to be
saying to them, "I await your instructions. You can be anything you
want to be. I will be anything you want me to be."

Hi ho.



I learned about this Chinese scheme long after Eliza died, and long
after I lost all my authority as President of the United States of
America. There was nothing I could do with such knowledge by then.

One thing amused me, though: I was told that poor old Western
Civilization had provided the Chinese the inspiration to put together
such synthetic geniuses. The Chinese got the idea from the American
and European scientists who put their heads together during the Second
World War, with the single- minded intention of creating an, atomic
bomb.

Hi ho.














Chapter 17

OUR poor parents had first believed that we were idiots. They had
tried to adapt to that. Then they believed that we were geniuses. They
had tried to adapt to that. Now they were told that we were dull
normals, and they were trying to adapt to that.

As Eliza and I watched through peepholes, they made a pitiful and
fog-bound plea for help. They asked Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner how
they were to harmonize our dullness with the fact that we could
converse so learnedly on so many subjects in so many languages.

Dr. Cordiner was razor-keen to enlighten them on just this point "The
world is full of people who are very clever at seeming much smarter
than they really are," she said. "They dazzle us with facts and
quotations and foreign words and so on, whereas the truth is that they
know almost nothing of use in life as it is really lived. My purpose
is to detect such people - so that society can be protected from them,
and so they can be protected from themselves.

"Your Eliza is a perfect example," she went on. "She has lectured to
me on economics and astronomy and music and every other subject you
can think of, and yet she can neither read nor write, nor will she
ever be able to."



She said that our case was not a sad one, since there were no big jobs
we wished to hold. "They have almost no ambition at all," she said,
"so life can't disappoint them. They want only that life as they have
known it should go on forever, which is impossible, of course."

Father nodded sadly. "And the boy is the smarter of the two?"

"To the extent he can read and write," said Dr. Cordiner. "He isn't
nearly as socially outgoing as his sister. When he is away from her,
he becomes as silent as a tomb.

"I suggest that he be sent to some special school, which won't be too
demanding academically or too threatening socially, where he can learn
to paddle his own canoe."

"Do what?" said Father.

Dr. Cordiner told him again. "Paddle his own canoe," she said.



Eliza and I should have lacked our way through the wall at that point
- should have entered the library ragingly, in an explosion of plaster
and laths.

But we had sense enough to know that our power to eavesdrop at will
was one of the few advantages we had. So we stole back to our
bedrooms, and then burst into the corridor, and came running down the
front stairs and across the foyer and into the library, doing
something we had never done before. We were sobbing.

We announced that, if anybody tried to part us, we would kill
ourselves.



Dr. Cordiner laughed at this. She told our parents that several of the
questions in her tests were designed to detect suicidal tendencies. "I
absolutely guarantee you," she said, "that the last thing either one
of these two would do would be to commit suicide."

Her saying this so jovially was a tactical mistake on her part, for it
caused something in Mother to snap. The atmosphere in the room became
electrified as Mother stopped being a weak and polite and credulous
doll.

Mother did not say anything at first. But she had clearly become
subhuman in the finest sense. She was a coiled female panther,
suddenly willing to tear the throats out of any number of childrearing
experts - in defense of her young.

It was the one and only time that she would ever be irrationally
committed to being the mother of and me.



Eliza and I sensed this sudden jungle alliance telepathically, I
think. At any rate, I remember that the damp velvet linings of my
sinus cavities were tingling with encouragement.

We left off our crying, which we were no good at doing anyway. Yes,
and we made a clear demand which could be satisfied at once. We asked
to be tested for intelligence again - as a pair this time.

"We want to show you," I said, "how glorious we are when we work
together, so that nobody will ever talk about parting us again."

We spoke carefully. I explained who "Betty and Bobby Brown" were. I
agreed that they were stupid. I said we had had no experience with
hating, and had had trouble understanding that particular human
activity whenever we encountered it in books.

"But we are making small beginnings in hating now," said Eliza. "Our
hating is strictly limited at this point - to only two people in this
Universe: To Betty and Bobby Brown."



Dr. Cordiner, as it turned out, was a coward, among other things. Like
so many cowards, she chose to go on bullying at the worst possible
time. She jeered at Eliza's and my request.

"What kind of a world do you think this is?" she said, and so on.

So Mother got up and went over to her, not touching her, and not
looking her in the eyes, either. Mother spoke to her throat, and, in a
tone between a purr and a growl, she called Dr. Cordiner an
"overdressed little sparrow-fart"














Chapter 18

SO Eliza and I were retested - as a pair this time. We sat
side-by-side at the stainless steel table in the tiled diningroom.

We were so happy!

A depersonalized Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner administered the tests
like a robot, while our parents looked on. She had furnished us with
new tests, so that the challenges would all be fresh.

Before we began, Eliza said to Mother and Father, "We promise to
answer every question correctly."

Which we did.



What were the questions like? Well, I was poking around the ruins of a
school on Forty-sixth Street yesterday, and I was lucky enough to find
a whole batch of intelligence tests, all set to go.

I quote:

"A man purchased 100 shares of stock at five dollars a share. If each
share rose ten cents the first month, decreased eight cents the second
month, and gained three cents the third month, what was the value of
the man's investment at the end of the third month?"

Or try this:

"How many digits are there to the left of the decimal place in the
square root of 692038.42753?"

Or this:

"A yellow tulip viewed through a piece of blue glass looks what
color?"

Or this:

"Why does the Little Dipper appear to turn about the North Star once a
day?"

Or this:

"Astronomy is to geology as steeplejack is to what?"

And so on. Hi ho.



We made good on Eliza's promise of perfection, as I have said.

The only trouble was that the two of us, in the innocent process of
checking and rechecking our answers, wound up under the table - with
our legs wrapped around each others' necks in scissors grips, and
snorting and snuffling into each others' crotches.

When we regained our chairs, Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner had fainted,
and our parents were gone.



At ten o'clock the next morning, I was taken by automobile to a school
for severely disturbed children on Cape Cod.














Chapter 19

IT is sundown again. A bird down around Thirty-first Street and Fifth,
where there is an Army tank with a tree growing out of its turret,
calls out to me. It asks the same question over and over again with
piercing clarity.

"Whip poor Will?" it says.

I never call that bird a "whippoorwill," and neither do Melody and
Isadore, who follow my lead in naming things. They seldom call
Manhattan "Manhattan," for example, or "The Island of Death," which is
its common name on the mainland. They do as I do: They call it
"Skyscraper National Park," without knowing what the joke is in that,
or, with equal humorlessness, "Angkor Wat."

And what they call the bird that asks about whipping when the sun goes
down is what Eliza and I called it when we were children. It was a
correct name which we had learned from a dictionary.

We treasured the name for the superstitious dread it inspired. The
bird became a nightmare creature in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch
when we spoke its name. And, whenever we heard its cry, we spoke its
name simultaneously. It was almost the only occasion on which we would
speak simultaneously.

"The cry of The Nocturnal Goatsucker," we would say.



And now I hear Melody and Isadore saying that, too, in a part of the
lobby where I cannot see them. "The cry of the Nocturnal Goatsucker,"
they say.



Eliza and I listened to that bird one evening before my departure for
Cape Cod.

We had fled the mansion for the privacy of the dank mausoleum of
Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.

"Whip poor Will?" came the question, from somewhere out under the
apple trees.



Even when we put our heads together, we could think of little to say.

I have heard that condemned prisoners often think of themselves as
dead people, long before they die. Perhaps that was how our genius
felt, knowing that a cruel axeman, so to speak, was about to split it
into two nondescript chunks of meat, into Betty and Bobby Brown.

Be that as it may, our hands were busy - which is often the case with
the hands of dying people. We had brought what we thought were the
best of our writings with us. We rolled them into a cylinder, which we
hid in an empty bronze funerary urn.

The urn had been intended for the ashes of the wife of Professor
Swain, who had chosen to be buried here in New York, instead. It was
encrusted with verdigris.

Hi ho.



What was on the papers?

A method for squaring circles, I remember - and a utopian scheme for
creating artificial extended families in America by issuing everyone a
new middle name. All persons with the same middle name would be
relatives.

Yes, and there was our critique of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and
an essay on the nature of gravity, which concluded that gravity had
surely been a variable in ancient times.

There was a paper, I remember, which argued that teeth should be
washed with hot water, just like dishes and pots and pans.

And so on.



It was Eliza who had thought of hiding the papers in the urn.

It was Eliza who now put the lid in place.

We were not close together when she did it, so what she said was her
own invention: "Say goodbye forever to your intelligence, Bobby
Brown."

"Goodbye," I said.



"Eliza - " I said, "so many of the books I've read to you said that
love was the most important thing of all. Maybe I should tell you that
I love you now."

"Go ahead," she said.

"I love you, Eliza," I said.

She thought about it. "No," she said at last, "I don't like it."

"Why not?" I said.

"It's as though you were pointing a gun at my head," she said. "It's
just a way of getting somebody to say something they probably don't
mean. What else can I say, or anybody say, but, 1 love you, too'?"

"You don't love me?" I said.

"What could anybody love about Bobby Brown?" she said.



Somewhere outside, out under the apple trees, the Nocturnal Goatsucker
asked his question again.














Chapter 20

ELIZA did not come down to breakfast the next morning. She remained in
her room until I was gone.

Our parents came along with me in their chauffeur- driven Mercedes
limousine. I was their child with a future. I could read and write.

And, even as we rolled through the lovely countryside, my forgettery
set to work.

It was a protective mechanism against unbearable grief, one which I,
as a pediatrician, am persuaded all children have.

Somewhere behind me, it seemed, was a twin sister who was not nearly
as smart as I was. She had a name. Her name was Eliza Mellon Swain.



Yes, and the school year was so structured that none of us ever had to
go home. I went to England and France and Germany and Italy and
Greece. I went to summer camp.

And it was determined that, while I was surely no genius, and was
incapable of originality, I had a better than average mind. I was
patient and orderly, and could sort out good ideas from heaps of
balderdash.

I was the first child in the history of the school to take College
Boards. I did so well that I was invited to come to Harvard. I
accepted the invitation, although my voice had yet to change.

And I would now and then be reminded by my parents, who became very
proud of me, that somewhere I had a twin sister who was little more
than a human vegetable. She was in an expensive institution for people
of her sort.

She was only a name.



Father was killed in an automobile accident during my first year in
medical school. He had thought enough of me to name me an executor of
his will.

And I was visited in Boston soon after that by a fat and shifty-eyed
attorney named Norman Mushari, Jr. He told me what seemed at first to
be a rambling and irrelevant story about a woman who had been locked
away for many years against her will - in an institution for the
feeble-minded.

She had hired him, he said, to sue her relatives and the institution
for damages, to gain her release at once, and to recover all
inheritances which had been wrongly withheld.

She had a name, which, of course, was Eliza Mellon Swain.














Chapter 21

MOTHER would say later of the hospital where we abandoned Eliza to
Limbo: "It wasn't a cheap hospital, you know. It cost two hundred
dollars a day. And the doctors begged us to stay away, didn't they,
Wilbur?"

"I think so, Mother," I said. And then I told the truth: "I forget."



I was then not only a stupid Bobby Brown, but a conceited one. Though
only a first-year medical student with the genitalia of an infant
field mouse, I was the master of a great house on Beacon Hill. I was
driven to and from school in a Jaguar - and I had already taken to
dressing as I would dress when President of the United States, like a
medical mountebank during the era of Chester Alan Arthur, say.

There was a party there nearly every night. I would customarily make
an appearance of only a few minutes smoking hashish in a meerschaum
pipe, and wearing an emerald-green, watered-silk dressing gown.

A pretty girl came up to me at one of those parties, and she said to
me, "You are so ugly, you're the sexiest thing I ever saw."

"I know," I said. "I know, I know."



Mother visited me a lot on Beacon Hill, where I had a special suite
built just for her - and I visited her a lot in Turtle Bay. Yes, and
reporters came to question us in both places after Norman Mushari,
Jr., got Eliza out of the hospital.

It was a big story.

It was always a big story when multimillionaires mistreated their own
relatives.

Hi ho.



It was embarrassing, and should have been, of course.

We had not seen Eliza yet, and had not been able to reach her by
telephone. Meanwhile, though, she said justly insulting things about
us almost every day in the press.

All we had to show reporters was a copy of a telegram we had sent to
Eliza, in care of her lawyer, and Eliza's reply to it.

Our telegram said: "WE LOVE YOU. YOUR MOTHER AND YOUR BROTHER."

Eliza's telegram said this:

"I LOVE YOU TOO. ELIZA."



Eliza would not allow herself to be photographed. She had her lawyer
buy a confessional booth from a church which was being torn down. She
sat inside it when she granted interviews for television.

And Mother and I watched those interviews in agony, holding hands.

And Eliza's rowdy contralto had become so unfamiliar to us that we
thought there might be an imposter in the booth, but it was Eliza all
right.

I remember a television reporter asked her, "How did you spend your
time in the hospital, Miss Swain?"

"Singing," she said.

"Singing anything in particular?" he said.

"The same song - over and over again," she said.

"What song was that?" he said.

" 'Some Day My Prince Will Come,' " she told him.

"And did you have some specific prince in mind as your rescuer?" he
said.

"My twin brother," she said. "But he's a swine, of course. He never
came."














Chapter 22

MOTHER and I surely did not oppose Eliza and her lawyer in any way, so
she easily regained control of her wealth. And nearly the first thing
she did was to buy half-interest in The New England Patriots
professional football team.



This purchase resulted in more publicity. Eliza would still not come
out of the booth for cameras, but Mushari promised the world that she
was now wearing a New England Patriots blue and gold jersey in there.

She was asked in this particular interview if she kept up with current
events, to which she replied: "I certainly don't blame the Chinamen
for going home."

This had to do with the Republic of China's closing its embassy in
Washington. The miniaturization of human beings in China had
progressed so far at that point, that their ambassador was only sixty
centimeters tall. His farewell was polite and friendly. He said his
country was severing relations simply because there was no longer
anything going on in the United States which was of any interest to
the Chinese at all.

Eliza was asked to say why the Chinamen had been so right.

"What civilized country could be interested in a hell-hole like
America," she said, "where everybody takes such lousy care of their
own relatives?"



And then, one day, she and Mushari were seen crossing the
Massachusetts Avenue Bridge from Cambridge to Boston on foot. It was a
warm and sunny day. Eliza was carrying a parasol She was wearing the
jersey of her football team.



My God - was that poor girl ever a mess!

She was so bent over that her face was on level with Mushari's - and
Mushari was about the size of Napoleon Bonaparte. She was chain
smoking. She was coughing her head off.

Mushari was wearing a white suit. He carried a cane. He wore a red
rose in his lapel.

And he and his client were soon joined by a friendly crowd, and by
newspaper photographers and television crews.

And mother and I watched them on television - in horror, may I say,
for the parade was coming ever closer to my house on Beacon Hill.



"Oh, Wilbur, Wilbur, Wilbur - " said my mother as we watched, "is that
really your sister?"

I made a bitter joke - without smiling. "Either your only daughter,
Mother, or the sort of anteater known as an aardvark," I said.














Chapter 23

MOTHER was not up to a confrontation with Eliza. She retreated to her
suite upstairs. Nor did I want the servants to witness whatever
grotesque performance Eliza had in mind - so I sent them to their
quarters.

When the doorbell rang, I myself answered the door.

I smiled at the aardvark and the cameras and crowd. "Eliza! Dear
sister! What a pleasant surprise. Come in, come in!" I said.

For form's sake, I made a tentative gesture as though I might touch
her. She drew back. "You touch me, Lord Fauntleroy, and I'll bite you,
and you'll die of rabies," she said.



Policemen kept the crowd from following Eliza and Mushari into the
house, and I closed the drapes on the windows, so no one could see in.

When I was sure we had privacy, I said to her bleakly, "What brings
you here?"

"Lust for your perfect body, Wilbur," she said. She coughed and
laughed. "Is dear Mater here, or dear Pater?" She corrected herself.
"Oh, dear - dear Pater is dead, isn't he? Or is it dear Mater? It's so
hard to tell."

"Mother is in Turtle Bay, Eliza," I lied. Inwardly, I was swooning
with sorrow and loathing and guilt. I estimated that her crushed
ribcage had the capacity of a box of kitchen matches. The room was
beginning to smell like a distillery. Eliza had a problem with alcohol
as well. Her skin was bad. She had a complexion like our
great-grandmother's steamer trunk.

"Turtle Bay, Turtle Bay," she mused. "Did it ever occur to you, dear
Brother, that dear Father was not our Father at all?"

"What do you mean?" I said.

"Perhaps Mother stole from the bed and out of the house on a moonlit
night," she said, "and mated with a giant sea turtle in Turtle Bay."

Hi ho.



"Eliza," I said, "if we're going to discuss family matters, perhaps
Mr. Mushari should leave us alone."

"Why?" she said. "Normie is the only family I have."

"Now, now - " I said.

"That overdressed sparrow-fart of a mother of yours is surely no
relative of mine," she said.

"Now, now - " I said.

"And you don't consider yourself a relative of mine, do you?" she
said.

"What can I say?" I said.

"That's why we're visiting you - to hear all the wonderful things you
have to say," she said. "You were always the brainy one. I was just
some kind of tumor that had to be removed from your side."



"I never said that," I said.

"Other people said it, and you believed them," she said. "That's
worse. You're a Fascist, Wilbur. That's what you are."

"That's absurd," I said. "Fascists are inferior people who believe it
when somebody tells them they're superior," she said.

"Now, now - " I said.

Then they want everybody else to die," she said.



"This is getting us nowhere," I said.

"I'm used to getting nowhere," she said, "as you may have read in the
papers and seen on television."

"Eliza - " I said, "would it help at all for you to know that Mother
will be sick for the rest of our lives about that awful thing we did
to you?"

"How could that help?" she said. "That's the dumbest question I ever
heard."



She looped a great arm over the shoulders of Norman Mushari, Jr.
"Here's who knows how to help people," she said.

I nodded. "We're grateful to him. We really are."

"He's my mother and father and brother and God, all wrapped up in
one," she said. "He gave me the gift of life!

"He said to me, 'Money isn't going to make you feel any better,
Sweetheart, but we're going to sue the piss out of your relatives
anyway.' "

"Um," I said.

"But it sure helps a hell of a lot more than your expressions of
guilt, I must say. Those are just boasts about your own wonderful
sensibilities."

She laughed unpleasantly. "But I can see where you and Mother might
want to boast about your guilt. After all, it's the only thing you two
monkeys ever earned."

Hi ho.














Chapter 24

I assumed that Eliza had now assaulted my self- respect with every
weapon she had. I had somehow survived.

Without pride, with a clinical and cynical sort of interest, I noted
that I had a cast-iron character which would repel attacks,
apparently, even if I declined to put up defenses of any other kind.

How wrong I was about Eliza's having expended her fury!

Her opening attacks had been aimed merely at exposing the cast iron in
my character. She had merely sent out light patrols to cut down the
trees and shrubs in front of my character, to strip it of its vines,
so to speak.

And now, without my realizing it, the shell of my character stood
before her concealed howitzers at nearly point-blank range, as naked
and brittle as a Franklin stove.

Hi ho.



There was a lull. Eliza prowled about my livingroom, looking at my
books, which she couldn't read, of course. Then she returned to me,
and she cocked her head, and she said, "People get into Harvard
Medical School because they can read and write?"

"I worked very hard, Eliza," I said. "It wasn't easy for me. It isn't
easy now."

"If Bobby Brown becomes a doctor," she said, "that will be the
strongest argument I ever heard for the Christian Scientists."

"I will not be the best doctor there ever was," I said. "I won't be
the worst, either."

"You might be a very good man with a gong," she said. She was alluding
to recent rumors that the Chinese had had remarkable successes in
treating breast cancer with the music of ancient gongs. "You look like
a man," she said, "who could hit a gong almost every time."

"Thank you," I said.

"Touch me," she said.

"Pardon me?" I said.

"I'm your own flesh. I'm your sister. Touch me," she said.

"Yes, or course," I said. But my arms seemed queerly paralyzed.



Take your time," she said.

"Well - " I said, "since you hate me so - "

"I hate Bobby Brown," she said.

"Since you hate Bobby Brown - " I said.

"And Betty Brown," she said.

"That was so long ago," I said.

"Touch me," she said.

"Oh, Christ, Eliza!" I said. My arms still wouldn't move.

"I'll touch you," she said.

"Whatever you say," I said. I was scared stiff.

"You don't have a heart condition, do you Wilbur?" she said.

"No," I said.

"If I touch you, you promise you won't die?"

"Yes," I said.

"Maybe I'll die," she said.

"I hope not," I said.

"Just because I act like I know what's going to happen," she said,
"doesn't mean I know what's going to happen. Maybe nothing will
happen."

"Maybe," I said.

"I've never seen you so frightened," she said.

"I'm human," I said.

"You want to tell Normie what you're scared about?" she said.

"No," I said.



Eliza, with her fingertips almost brushing my cheek, quoted from a
dirty joke Withers Witherspoon had told another servant when we were
children. We had heard it through a wall. The joke had to do with a
woman who was wildly responsive during sexual intercourse. In the
joke, the woman warned a stranger who was beginning to make love to
her.

Eliza passed on the sultry warning to me: "Keep your hat on, Buster.
We may wind up miles from here."



Then she touched me.

We became a single genius again.














Chapter 25

WE went berserk. It was only by the Grace of God that we did not
tumble out of the house and into the crowd on Beacon Street Some parts
of us, of which I had not been at all aware, of which Eliza had been
excruciatingly aware, had been planning a reunion for a long, long
time.

I could no longer tell where I stopped and Eliza began, or where Eliza
and I stopped and the Universe began. It was gorgeous and it was
horrible. Yes, and let this be a measure of the quantity of energy
involved: The orgy went on for five whole nights and days.



Eliza and I slept for three days after that. When I at last woke up, I
found myself in my own bed. I was being fed intravenously.

Eliza, as I later found out, had been taken to her own home in a
private ambulance.



As for why nobody broke us up or summoned help: Eliza and I captured
Norman Mushari, Jr., and poor Mother and the servants - one by one.

I have no memory of doing this.

We tied them to wooden chairs and gagged them, apparently, and set
them neatly around the diningroom table.



We gave them food and water, thank Heavens, or we would have been
murderers. We would not let them go to the toilet, however, and fed
them nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I apparently left
the house several times to get more bread and jelly and peanut butter.

And then the orgy would begin again.



I remember reading out loud to Eliza from books on pediatrics and
child psychology and sociology and anthropology, and so on. I had
never thrown away any book from any course I had taken.

I remember writhing embraces which alternated with periods of my
sitting at my typewriter, with Eliza beside me. I was typing something
with super-human speed.

Hi ho.



When I came out of my coma, Mushari and my own lawyers had already
paid my servants handsomely for the agony they had suffered at the
dinner table, and for their silence as to the dreadful things they had
seen.

Mother had been released from Massachusetts General Hospital, and was
back in bed in Turtle Bay.



Physically, I had suffered from exhaustion and nothing more.

When I was allowed to rise, however, I was so damaged psychologically
that I expected to find everything unfamiliar. If gravity had become
variable on that day, as it in fact did many years later, if I had had
to crawl about my house on my hands and knees, as I often do now, I
would have thought it a highly appropriate response by the Universe to
all I had been through.



But little had changed. The house was tidy.

The books were back in their shelves. A broken thermostat had been
replaced. Three diningroom chairs had been sent out for repairs. The
diningroom carpet was somewhat piebald, pale spots indicating where
stains had been removed.

The one proof that something extraordinary had happened was itself a
paradigm of tidiness. It was a manuscript - on a coffee table in the
livingroom, where I had typed so furiously during the nightmare.

Eliza and I had somehow written a manual on childrearing.



Was it any good? Not really. It was only good enough to become, after
The Bible and The Joy of Cooking, the most popular book of all time.

Hi ho.



I found it so helpful when I began to practice pediatrics in Vermont
that I had it published under a pseudonym, Dr. Eli W. Rockmell, M.D.,
a sort of garbling of Eliza's and my names.

The publisher thought up the title, which was So You Went and Had a
Baby.



During our orgy, though, Eliza and I gave the manuscript a very
different title and sort of authorship, which was this:

THE CRY OF THE NOCTURNAL GOATSUCKER by BETTY AND BOBBY BROWN














Chapter 26

AFTER the orgy, mutual terror kept us apart.  I was told by our
go-between, Norman Mushari, Jr., that Eliza was even more shattered by
the orgy than I had been.

"I almost had to put her away again - " he said, "for good cause this
time."



Machu Picchu, the old Inca capital on the roof of the Andes in Peru,
was then becoming a haven for rich people and their parasites, people
fleeing social reforms and economic declines, not just in America, but
in all parts of the world. There were even some full-sized Chinese
there, who had declined to let their children be miniaturized.

And Eliza moved into a condominium down there, to be as far away as
possible from me.



When Mushari came to my house to tell me about Eliza's prospective
move to Peru, a week after the orgy, he confessed that he himself had
become severely disoriented while tied to a diningroom. chair.

"You looked more and more like Frankenstein monsters to me," he said.
"I became convinced that there was a switch somewhere in the house
that controlled you. I even figured out which switch it was. The
minute I untied myself, I ran to it and tore it out by the roots."

It was Mushari who had ripped the thermostat from the wall.



To demonstrate to me how changed he was, he admitted that he had been
wholly motivated by selfinterest when he set Eliza free. "I was a
bounty-hunter," he said, "finding rich people in mental hospitals who
didn't belong there - and setting them free. I left the poor to rot in
their dungeons."

"It was a useful service all the same," I said.

"Christ, I don't think so," he said. "Practically every sane person I
ever got out of a hospital went insane almost immediately afterwards.

"Suddenly I feel old," he said. "I can't take that any more."

Hi ho.



Mushari was so shaken by the orgy, in fact, that he turned Eliza's
legal and financial affairs over to the same people that Mother and I
used.

He came to my attention only once more, two years later, about the
tone I graduated from medical school - at the bottom of my class, by
the way. He had patented an invention of his own. There was a
photograph of him and a description of his patent on a business page
in The New York Times.

There was a national mania for tap-dancing at the time. Mushari had
invented taps which could be glued to the soles of shoes, and then
peeled off again. A person could carry the taps in little plastic bags
in a pocket or purse, according to Mushari, and put them on only when
it was time to tap-dance. 














Chapter 27

I never saw Eliza's face again after the orgy. I heard her voice only
twice - more once when I graduated from medical school, and again when
I was President of the United State of America, and she had been dead
for a long, long time.

Hi ho.



When Mother planned a graduation party for me at the Ritz in Boston,
across from the Public Gardens, she and I never dreamed that Eliza
would somehow hear of it, and would come all the way from Peru.

My twin never wrote or telephoned. Rumors about her were as vague as
those coming from China. She was drinking' too much, we had heard. She
had taken up golf.



I was having a wonderful time at my party, when a bellboy came to tell
me I was wanted outside - not just in the lobby, but in the balmy,
moonlit night outdoors. Eliza was the farthest thing from my mind.

My guess, as I followed the bellboy, was that there was a Rolls-Royce
from my mother parked outside.

I was reassured by the servile manner and uniform of my guide. I was
also giddy with champagne. I did not hesitate to follow as he led me
across Arlington Street and then into the enchanted forest, into the
Public Gardens on the other side.

He was a fraud. He was not a bellboy at all.



Deeper and deeper we went into the trees. And in every clearing we
came to, I expected to see my Rolls-Royce.

But he brought me to a statue instead. It depicted an old-fashioned
doctor, dressed much as it amused me to dress. He was melancholy but
proud. He held a sleeping youth in his arms.

As the inscription in the moonlight told me, this was a monument to
the first use of anaesthetics in forgery in the United States, which
took place in Boston.



I had been aware of a clattering whir somewhere in the city, over
Commonwealth Avenue perhaps. But I had not identified it as a hovering
helicopter.

But now the bogus bellhop, who was really an Inca servant of Eliza's,
fired a magnesium flare into the air.

Everything touched by that unnatural dazzle became statuary - lifeless
and exemplary, and weighing tons.

The helicopter materialized directly over us, itself made allegorical,
transformed into a terrible mechanical angel by the glare of the
flare.

Eliza was up there with a bullhorn.



It seemed possible to me that she might shoot me from there, or hit me
with a bag of excrement. She had traveled all the way from Peru to
deliver one half of a Shakespearean sonnet.

"Listen!" she said. "Listen!" she said. And then she said, "Listen!"
again.

The flare was meanwhile dying nearby - its parachute snagged in a
treetop.

Here is what Eliza said to me, and to the neighborhood:

"O! how thy worth with manners may I sing,

"When thou art all the better part of me?

"What can mine own praise to mine own self bring?

"And what is't but mine own when I praise thee?

"Even for this let us divided live,

"And our dear love lose name of single one,

"That by this separation I may give

"That due to thee, which thou deserv'st alone."



I called up to her through my cupped hands. "Eliza!" I said. And then
I shouted something daring, and something I genuinely felt for the
first time in my life.

"Eliza! I love you!" I said.

All was darkness now.

"Did you hear me, Eliza?" I said. "I love you! I really love you!"

"I heard you," she said. "Nobody should ever say that to anybody."

"I mean it," I said.

"Then I will say in turn something that I really mean, my brother - my
twin."

"What is it?" I said.

She said this: "God guide the hand and mind of Dr. Wilbur Rockefeller
Swain."



And then the helicopter flew away.

Hi ho.














Chapter 28

I returned to the Ritz, laughing and crying - a two-meter
Neanderthaler in a ruffled shirt and a robin's-egg blue velvet tuxedo.
There was a crowd of people who were curious about the brief supernova
in the east,, and about the voice which had spoken from Heaven of
separation and love. I pressed past them and into the ballroom,
leaving it to private detectives stationed at the door to turn back
the following crowd.

The guests at my party were only now beginning to hear hints that
something marvelous had happened outside. I went to Mother, to tell
her what Eliza had done. I was puzzled to find her talking to a
nondescript, middle-aged stranger, dressed, like the detectives, in a
cheap business suit.

Mother introduced him as "Dr. Mott." He was, of course, the doctor who
had looked after Eliza and me for so long in Vermont. He was in Boston
on business, and, as luck would have it, staying at the Ritz.

I was so full of news and champagne, though, that I did not know or
care who he was. And, having said my bit to Mother, I told Dr. Mott
that it had been nice to meet him, and I hurried on to other parts of
the room.



When I got back to Mother in about an hour, Dr. Mott had departed. She
told me again who he was. I expressed pro forma regrets at not having
spent more time with him. She gave me a note from him, which she said
was his graduation present to me.

It was written on Ritz stationery. It said simply this:

" 'If you can do no good, at least do no harm.' Hippocrates."



Yes, and when I converted the mansion in Vermont into a clinic and
small children's hospital, and also my permanent home, I had those
words chipped in stone over the front door. But they so troubled my
patients and their parents that I had them chipped away again. The
words seemed a confession of weakness and indecision to them, a
suggestion that they might as well have stayed away.

I continued to carry the words in my head, however, and in fact did
little harm. And the intellectual center of gravity for my practice
was a single volume which I locked into a safe each night - the bound
manuscript of the child-rearing manual Eliza and I had written during
our orgy on Beacon Hill.

Somehow, we had put everything in there.

And the years flew by.



Somewhere in there I married an equally wealthy woman, actually a
third cousin of mine, whose maiden name was Rose Aldrich Ford. She was
very unhappy, because I did not love her, and because I would never
take her anywhere. I have never been good at loving. We had a child,
Carter Paley Swain, whom I also failed to love. Carter was normal, and
completely uninteresting to me. He was somehow like a summer squash on
the vine - featureless and watery, and merely growing larger all the
time.

After our divorce, he and his mother bought a condominium in the same
building with Eliza, down in Machu Picchu, Peru. I never heard from
them again - even when I became President of the United States.

And the time flew.



I woke up one morning to find that I was almost fifty years old!
Mother had moved in with me in Vermont. She sold her house in Turtle
Bay. She was feeble and afraid.

She talked a good deal about Heaven to me.

I knew nothing at all about the subject then. I assumed that when
people were dead they were dead.

"I know your father is waiting for me with open arms," she said, "and
my Mommy and Daddy, too."

She was right about that, it turned out. Waiting around for more
people is just about all there is for people in Heaven to do.



The way Mother described Heaven, it sounded like a golf course in
Hawaii, with manicured fairways and greens running down to a lukewarm
ocean.

I twitted her only lightly about wanting that sort of Paradise. "It
sounds like a place where people would drink a lot of lemonade," I
said.

"I love lemonade," she replied.














Chapter 29

MOTHER talked toward the end, too, about how much she hated unnatural
things - synthetic flavors and fibers and plastics and so on. She
loved silk and cotton and linen and wool and leather, she said, and
clay and glass and stone. She loved horses and sailboats, too, she
said.

"They're all coming back, Mother," I said, which was true.

My hospital itself had twenty horses by then - and wagons and carts
and carriages and sleighs. I had a horse of my own, a great
Clydesdale. Golden feathers hid her hooves. "Budweiser" was her name.

Yes, and the harbors of New York and Boston and San Francisco were
forests of masts again, I'd heard. It had been quite some time since
I'd seen them.



Yes, and I found the hospitality of my mind to fantasy pleasantly
increased as machinery died and communications from the outside world
became more and more vague.

So I was unsurprised one night, after having tucked Mother in bed, to
enter my own bedroom with a lighted candle, and to find a Chinese man
the size of my thumb sitting on my mantelpiece. He was wearing a
quilted blue jacket and trousers and cap.

As far as I was able to determine afterwards, he was the first
official emissary from the People's Republic of China to the United
States of America in more than twenty-five years.



During the same period, not a single foreigner who got inside China,
so far as I know, ever returned from there.

So "going to China" became a widespread euphemism for committing
suicide.

Hi ho.



My little visitor motioned for me to come closer, so he would not have
to shout. I presented one ear to him. It must have been a horrible
sight - the tunnel with all the hair and bits of wax inside.

He told me that he was a roving ambassador, and had been chosen for
the job because of his visibility to foreigners. He was much, much
larger, he said, than an average Chinese.

"I thought you people had no interest in us any more," I said.

He smiled. "That was a foolish thing for us to say, Dr. Swain," he
said. "We apologize."

"You mean that we know things that you don't know?" I said.

"Not quite," he said. "I mean that you used to know things that we
don't know."

"I can't imagine what those things would be," I said.

"Naturally not," he said. "I will give you a hint: I bring you
greetings from your twin sister in Machu Picchu, Dr. Swain."

"That's not much of a hint," I said.

"I wish very much to see the papers you and your sister put so many
years ago into the funeral urn in the mausoleum of Professor Elihu
Roosevelt Swain," he said.



It turned out that the Chinese had sent an expedition to Machu Picchu
- to recover, if they could, certain lost secrets of the Incas. Like
my visitor, they were oversize for Chinese.

Yes, and Eliza approached them with a proposition. She said she knew
where there were secrets which were as good or better than anything
the Incas had had.

"If what I say turns out to be true," she told them, "I want you to
reward me - with a trip to your colony on Mars."



He said that his name was Fu Manchu.

I asked him how he had got to my mantelpiece. "The same way we get to
Mars," he replied.














Chapter 30

SO I agreed to take Fu Manchu out to the mausoleum. I put him in my
breast pocket.

I felt very inferior to him. I was sure he had the power of life and
death over me, as small as he was. Yes, and he knew so much more than
I did - even about medicine, even about myself, perhaps. He made me
feel immoral, too. It was greedy for me to be so big. My supper that
night could have fed a thousand men his size.



The exterior doors to the mausoleum had been welded shut So Fu Manchu
and I had to enter the secret passageways, the alternative universe of
my childhood, and come up through the mausoleum's floor.

As I made our way through cobwebs, I asked him about the Chinese use
of gongs in the treatment of cancer.

"We are way beyond that now," he said.

"Maybe it is something we could still use here," I said.

"I'm sorry - " he said from my pocket, "but your civilization,
so-called, is much too primitive. You could never understand."

"Urn," I said.



He answered all my questions that way - saying, in effect, that I was
too dumb to understand anything.



When we got to the underside of the stone trapdoor to the mausoleum, I
had trouble heaving it open.

"Put your shoulder into it," he said, and, 'Tap it with a brick," and
so on.

His advice was so simple-minded, that I concluded that the Chinese
knew little more about dealing with gravity than I did at the time.

Hi ho.



The door finally opened, and we ascended into the mausoleum. I must
have been even more frightful than usual to look at. I was swaddled in
cobwebs from head to toe.

I removed Fu Manchu from my pocket, and, at his request, I placed him
on top of the lead casket of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.

I had only one candle for illumination. But Fu Manchu now produced
from his attache case a tiny box. It filled the chamber with a light
as brilliant as the flare that had lit Eliza's and my reunion in
Boston - so long ago.

He asked me to take the papers from the urn, which I did. They were
perfectly preserved.

"This is bound to be trash," I said.

"To you, perhaps," he said. He asked me to flatten out the papers and
spread them over the casket, which I did.

"How could we know when we were children something not known even
today to the Chinese?" I said.

"Luck," he said. He began to stroll across the papers, in his tiny
black and white basketball shoes, pausing here and there to take
pictures of something he had read. He seemed especially interested in
our essay on gravity - or so it seems to me now, with the benefit of
hindsight.



He was satisfied at last. He thanked me for my cooperation, and told
me that he would now dematerialize and return to China.

"Did you find anything at all valuable?" I asked him.

He smiled. "A ticket to Mars for a rather large Caucasian lady in
Peru," he replied.

Hi ho.














Chapter 31

THREE weeks later, on the morning of my fiftieth birthday, I rode my
horse Budweiser down into the hamlet - to pick up the mail.

There was a note from Eliza. It said only this: "Happy birthday to us!
Going to China!"

That message was two weeks old, according to the postmark. There was
fresher news in the same mail. "Regret to inform you that your sister
died on Mars in an avalanche." It was signed, "Fu Manchu."



I read those tragic notes while standing on the old wooden porch of
the post office, in the shadow of the little church next door.

An extraordinary feeling came over me, which I first thought to be
psychological in origin, the first rush of grief. I seemed to have
taken root on the porch. I could not pick up my feet My features,
moreover, were being dragged downward like melting wax.

The truth was that the force of gravity had increased tremendously.

There was a great crash in the church. The steeple had dropped its
bell.

Then I went right through the porch, and was slammed to the earth
beneath it.



In other parts of the world, of course, elevator cables were snapping,
airplanes were crashing, ships were sinking, motor vehicles were
breaking their axles, bridges were collapsing, and on and on.

It was terrible.














Chapter 32

THAT first ferocious jolt of heavy gravity lasted less than a minute,
but the world would never be the same again.

I dazedly climbed out from under the post office porch when it was
over. I gathered up my mail.

Budweiser was dead. She had tried to remain standing. Her insides had
fallen out.



I must have suffered something like shell shock. People were crying
for help there in the hamlet, and I was the only doctor. But I simply
walked away.

I remember wandering under the family apple trees.

I remember stopping at the family cemetery, and gravely opening an
envelope from the Eli Lilly Company, a pharmaceutical house. Inside
were a dozen sample pills, the color and size of lentils.

The accompanying literature, which I read with great care, explained
that the trade name for the pills was "tri-benzo-Deportamil." The
"Deport" part of the name had reference to good deportment, to
socially acceptable behavior.

The pills were a treatment for the socially unacceptable symptoms of
Tourette's Disease, whose sufferers involuntarily spoke obscenities
and made insulting gestures no matter where they were.

In my disoriented state, it seemed very important that I take two of
the pills immediately, which I did.

Two minutes passed, and then my whole being was flooded with
contentment and confidence such as I had never felt before.

Thus began an addiction which was to last for nearly thirty years.

Hi ho.



It was a miracle that no one in my hospital died. The beds and
wheelchairs of some of the heavier children had broken. One nurse
crashed through the trapdoor which had once been hidden by Eliza's
bed. She broke both legs.

Mother, thank God, slept through it all.

When she woke up, I was standing at the foot of her bed. She told me
again about how much she hated unnatural things.

"I know, Mother," I said. "I couldn't agree with you more. Back to
Nature," I said.



I do not know to this day whether that awful jolt of gravity was
Nature, or whether it was an experiment by the Chinese.

I thought at the time that there was a connection between the jolt and
Fu Manchu's photographing of Eliza's and my essay on gravity.

Yes, and, coked to the ears on tri-benzo-Deportamil, I fetched all our
papers from the mausoleum.



The paper on gravity was incomprehensible to me. Eliza and I were
perhaps ten thousand times as smart when we put our heads together as
when we were far apart.

Our Utopian scheme for reorganizing America into thousands of
artificial extended families, however, was clear. Fu Manchu had found
it ridiculous, incidentally.

"This is truly the work of children," he'd said.



I found it absorbing. It said that there was nothing new about
artificial extended families in America. Physicians felt themselves
related to other physicians, lawyers to lawyers, writers to writers,
athletes to athletes, politicians to politicians, and so on.

Eliza and I said these were bad sorts of extended families, however.
They excluded children and old people and housewives, and losers of
every description. Also: Their interests were usually so specialized
as to seem nearly insane to outsiders.

"An ideal extended family," Eliza and I had written so long ago,
"should give proportional representation to all sorts of Americans,
according to their numbers. The creation of ten thousand such
families, say, would provide America with ten thousand parliaments, so
to speak, which would discuss sincerely and expertly what only a few
hypocrites now discuss with passion, which is the welfare of all
mankind."



My reading was interrupted by my head nurse, who came in to tell me
that our frightened young patients had all gotten to sleep at last.

I thanked her for the good news. And then I heard myself tell her
casually, "Oh - and I want you to write to the Eli Lilly Company, in
Indianapolis, and order two thousand doses of a new drug of theirs
called 'tri-benzo-Deportamil.' "

Hi ho.














Chapter 33

MOTHER died two weeks after that.

Gravity would not trouble us again for another twenty years.

And time flew. Time was a blurry bird now - made indistinct by
ever-increasing dosages of tri-benzo-Deportamil.



Somewhere in there, I closed my hospital, gave up medicine entirely,
and was elected United States Senator from Vermont.

And time flew.

I found myself running for President one day. My valet pinned a
campaign button to the lapel of my claw-hammer coat. It bore the
slogan which would win the election for me:

[graphic of a badge bearing the Amercian flag and the words "Lonesome
No More!"]



I appeared here in New York only once during that campaign. I spoke
from the steps of the Public Library at Forty-second and Fifth. This
island was by then a sleepy seaside resort. It had never recovered
from that first jolt of gravity, which had stripped its buildings of
their elevators, and had flooded its tunnels, and had buckled all but
one bridge, which was the Brooklyn Bridge.

Now gravity had started to turn mean again. It was no longer a jolting
experience. If the Chinese were indeed in charge of it, they had
learned how to increase or decrease it gradually, wishing to cut down
on injuries and property damage, perhaps. It was as majestically
graceful as the tides now.



When I spoke from the library steps, the gravity was heavy. So I chose
to sit in a chair while speaking. I was cold sober, but I lolled in
the chair like a drunken English squire from olden times.

My audience, which was composed mostly of retired people, actually lay
down on Fifth Avenue, which the police had blocked off, but where
there would have been hardly any traffic anyway. Somewhere over on
Madison Avenue, perhaps, there was a small explosion. The island's
useless skyscrapers were being quarried.



I spoke of American loneliness. It was the only subject I needed for
victory, which was lucky. It was the only subject I had.

It was a shame, I said, that I had not come along earlier in American
history with my simple and workable anti-loneliness plan. I said that
all the damaging excesses of Americans in the past were motivated by
loneliness rather than a fondness for sin.

An old man crawled up to me afterwards and told me how he used to buy
life insurance and mutual funds and household appliances and
automobiles and so on, not because he liked them or needed them, but
because the salesman seemed to promise to be his relative, and so on.

"I had no relatives and I needed relatives," he said.

"Everybody does," I said.

He told me he had been a drunk for a while, trying to make relatives
out of people in bars. "The bartender would be land of a father, you
know - " he said. "And then all of a sudden it was closing time."

"I know," I said. I told him a half-truth about myself which had
proved to be popular on the campaign trail. "I used to be so
lonesome," I said, "that the only person I could share my innermost
thoughts with was a horse named 'Budweiser.' "

And I told him how Budweiser had died.



During this conversation, I would bring my hand to my mouth again and
again, seeming to stifle exclamations and so on. I was actually
popping tiny green pills into my mouth. They were outlawed by then,
and no longer manufactured. I had perhaps a bushel of them back in the
Senate Office Building.

They accounted for my unflagging courtesy and optimism, and perhaps
for my failure to age as quickly as other men. I was seventy years
old, but I had the vigor of a man half that age.

I had even picked up a pretty new wife, Sophie Rothschild Swain, who
was only twenty-three.



"If you get elected, and I get issued all these new artificial
relatives - " said the man. He paused. "How many did you say?"

"Ten thousand brothers and sisters," I told him. "One-hundred and
ninety-thousand cousins."

"Isn't that an awful lot?" he said.

"Didn't we just agree we need all the relatives we can get in a
country as big and clumsy as ours?" I said. "If you ever go to
Wyoming, say, won't it be a comfort to you to know you have many
relatives there?"

He thought that over. "Well, yes - I expect" he said at last.

"As I said in my speech:" I told him, "your new middle name would
consist of a noun, the name of a flower or fruit or nut or vegetable
or legume, or a bird or a reptile or a fish, or a mollusk, or a gem or
a mineral or a chemical element - connected by a hypen to a number
between one and twenty." I asked him what his name was at the present
time.

"Elmer Glenville Grasso," he said.

"Well," I said, "you might become Elmer Uranium-3 Grasso, say.
Everybody with Uranium as a part of their middle name would be your
cousin."

"That brings me back to my first question," he said. "What if I get
some artificial relative I absolutely can't stand?"



"What is so novel about a person's having a relative he can't stand?"
I asked him. "Wouldn't you say that sort of thing has been going on
now for perhaps a million years, Mr. Grasso?"

And then I said a very obscene thing to him. I am not inclined toward
obscenities, as this book itself demonstrates. In all my years of
public life, I had never said an off-color thing to the American
people.

So it was terrifically effective when I at last spoke coarsely. I did
so in order to make memorable how nicely scaled to average human
beings my new social scheme would be.

Mr. Grasso was not the first to hear the startling rowdy-isms. I had
even used them on radio. There was no such thing as television any
more.

"Mr. Grasso," I said, "I personally will be very disappointed, if you
do not say to artificial relatives you hate, after I am elected,
'Brother or Sister or Cousin,' as the case may be, 'why don't you take
a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying fuck
at the mooooooooooooon?' "



You know what relatives you say that to are going to do, Mr. Grasso?"
I went on. "They're going to go home and try to figure out how to be
better relatives!"



"And consider how much better off you will be, if the reforms go into
effect, when a beggar comes up to you and asks for money," I went on.

"I don't understand," said the man.

"Why," I said, "you say to that beggar, "What's your middle name?' And
he will say 'Oyster-19' or 'Chickadee- 1,' or 'Hollyhock-13,' or some
such thing.

"And you can say to him, 'Buster - I happen to be a Uranium-3. You
have one hundred and ninety thousand cousins and ten thousand brothers
and sisters. You're not exactly alone in this world. I have relatives
of my own to look after. So why don't you take a flying fuck at a
rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying fuck at the
moooooooooooon?' "














Chapter 34

THE fuel shortage was so severe when I was elected, that the first
stiff problem I faced after my inauguration was where to get enough
electricity to power the computers which would issue the new middle
names.

I ordered horses and soldiers and wagons of the ramshackle Army I had
inherited from my predecessor to haul tons of papers from the National
Archives to the powerhouse. These documents were all from the
Administration of Richard M. Nixon, the only President who was ever
forced to resign.



I myself went to the Archives to watch. I spoke to the soldiers and a
few passers-by from the steps there. I said that Mr. Nixon and his
associates had been unbalanced by loneliness of an especially virulent
sort.

"He promised to bring us together, but tore us apart instead," I said.
"Now, hey presto!, he will bring us together after all."

I posed for photographs beneath the inscription on the facade of the
Archives, which said this:

"THE PAST IS PROLOGUE."

"They were not basically criminals," I said. "But they yearned to
partake of the brotherhood they saw in Organized Crime."



"So many crimes committed by lonesome people in Government are
concealed in this place," I said, "that the inscription might well
read, 'Better a Family of Criminals than No Family at All.'

"I think we are now marking the end of the era of such tragic
monkeyshines. The Prologue is over, friends and neighbors and
relatives. Let the main body of our noble work begin.

"Thank you," I said.



There were no large newspapers or national magazines to print my
words. The huge printing plants had all shut down - for want of fuel.
There were no microphones. There were just the people there.

Hi ho.



I passed out a special decoration to the soldiers, to commemorate the
occasion. It consisted of a pale blue ribbon from which depended a
plastic button.

I explained, only half-jokingly, that the ribbon represented "The
Bluebird of Happiness." And the button was inscribed with these words,
of course: 


[graphic of a badge bearing the Amercian flag and the words "Lonesome
No More!"]














Chapter 35

IT is mid-morning here in Skyscraper National Park. The gravity is
balmy, but Melody and Isadore will not work on the baby's pyramid
today. We will have a picnic on top of the building instead. The young
people are being so companionable with me because my birthday is only
two days away now. What fun!

There is nothing they love more than a birthday!

Melody plucks a chicken which a slave of Vera Chipmunk-17 Zappa
brought to us this morning. The slave also brought two loaves of bread
and two liters of creamy beer. He pantomimed how nourishing he was
being to us. He pressed the bases of the two beer bottles to his
nipples, pretending that he had breasts that gave creamy beer.

We laughed. We clapped our hands.



Melody tosses pinches of feathers skyward. Because of the mild
gravity, it appears that she is a white witch. Each snap of her
fingers produces butterflies.

I have an erection. So does Isadore. So does every male.



Isadore sweeps the lobby with a broom he has made of twigs. He sings
one of the only two songs he knows. The other song is "Happy Birthday
to You." Yes, and he is tone-deaf, too, so he drones. "

"Row, row, row your boat," he drones, "Gently down the stream.
"Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily - "Life is but a dream."



Yes, and I now remember a day in the dream of my He, far upstream from
now, in which I received a chatty letter from the President of my
country, who happened to be me. Like any other citizen, I had keen
waiting on pins and needles to learn from the computers what my new
middle name would be.

My President congratulated me on my new middle name. He asked me to
use it as a regular part of my signature, and on my mailbox and
letterheads and in directories, and so on. He said that the name was
selected at immaculate random, and was not intended as a comment on my
character or my appearance or my past.

He offered deceptively homely, almost inane examples of how I might
serve artificial relatives: By watering their houseplants while they
were away; by taking care of their babies so they could get out of the
house for an hour or two; by telling them the name of a truly painless
dentist; by mailing a letter for them; by keeping them company on a
scary visit to a. doctor; by visiting them in a jail or a hospital; by
keeping them company at a scary picture show.

Hi ho.



I was enchanted by my new middle name, by the way. I ordered that the
Oval Office of the White House be painted pale yellow immediately, in
celebration of my having become a Daffodil.

And, as I was telling my private secretary, Hortense Muskellunge-13
McBundy, to have the place repainted, a dishwasher from the White
House kitchen appeared in her office. He was bent on a very shy
errand, indeed. He was so embarrassed that be choked every time he
tried to speak.

When he at last managed to articulate his message, I embraced him. He
had come out of the steamy depths to tell me ever-so-bravely that he,
too, was a Daffodil-11.

"My brother," I said.














Chapter 36

WAS there no substantial opposition to the new social scheme? Why, of
course there was. And, as Eliza and I had predicted, my enemies were
so angered by the idea of artificial extended families that they
constituted a polyglot artificial extended family of their own.

They had campaign buttons, too, which they went on wearing long after
I was elected. It was inevitable what those buttons said, to wit:


[graphic of a badge bearing the Amercian flag and the words "Lonesome
Thank God!"]


I had to laugh, even when my own wife, the former Sophie Rothschild,
took to wearing a button like that.

Hi ho.



Sophie was furious when she received a form letter from her President,
who happened to be me, which instructed her to stop being a
Rothschild. She was to become a Peanut-3 instead.

Again: I am sorry, but I had to laugh.



Sophie smouldered about it for several weeks. And then she came
crawling into the Oval Office on an afternoon of particularly heavy
gravity - to tell me she hated me.

I was not stung.

As I have already said, I was fully aware that I was not the sort of
lumber out of which happy marriages were made.

I honestly did not think you would go this far, Wilbur," she said. "I
knew you were crazy, and that your sister was crazy, too. But I did
not believe you would go this far."



Sophie did not have to look up at me. I, too, was on the floor -
prone, with my chin resting on a pillow. I was reading a fascinating
report of a thing that had happened in Urbana, Illinois.

I did not give her my undivided attention, so she said, "What is it
you're reading that is so much more interesting than me?"

"Well - " I said, "for many years, I was the last American to have
spoken to a Chinese. That's not true any more. A delegation of Chinese
paid a call to the widow of a physicist in Urbana - about three weeks
ago."

Hi ho.



"I certainly don't want to waste your valuable time," she said.
"You're certainly closer to Chinamen than you ever were to me."

I had given her a wheelchair for Christmas - to use around the White
House on days of heavy gravity. I asked her why she didn't use it "It
makes me very sad," I said, "to have you go around on all-fours."

"I'm a Peanut now," she said. "Peanuts live very close to the ground.
Peanuts are famous for being low. They are the cheapest of the cheap,
and the lowest of the low."



That early in the game, I thought it was crucial the people not be
allowed to change their Government-issue middle names. I was wrong to
be so rigid about mat. All sorts of name-changing goes on now - here
on the Island of Death and everywhere. I can't see that any harm is
done.

But I was severe with Sophie. "You want to be an Eagle or a Diamond, I
suppose," I said.

"I want to be a Rothschild," she said.

Then perhaps you should go to Machu Picchu," I said. That was where
most of her blood relatives had gone.



"Are you really so sadistic," she said, "that you will make me prove
my love by befriending strangers who are now crawling out from damp
rocks like earwigs? Like centipedes? Like slugs? Like worms?"

"Now, now," I said.

"When was the last time you took a look at the freak show outside the
fence?" she said.

The perimeter of the White House grounds, just outside the fence, was
infested daily with persons claiming to be artificial relatives of
Sophie or me.

There were twin male midgets out there, I remember, holding a banner
that said "Flower Power."

There was a woman, I remember, who wore an Army field jacket over a
purple evening dress. On her head was an old-fashioned leather
aviator's helmet, goggles and all. She had a placard on the end of a
stick. "Peanut Butter," it said.



"Sophie - " I said, "that is not the general American population out
mere. And you are not mistaken when you say that they have crawled out
from under damp rocks - like centipedes and earwigs and worms. They
have never had a friend or a relative. They have had to believe all
their lives that they were perhaps sent to the wrong Universe, since
no one has ever bid them welcome or given them anything to do."

"I hate them," she said.

"Go ahead," I said. "There's very little harm in that, as far as I
know."

"I did not think you would go this far, Wilbur," she said. "I thought
you would be satisfied with being President I did not think you would
go this far."

"Well," I said, "I'm glad I did. And I am glad we have those people
outside the fence to think about, Sophie. They are frightened hermits
who have been tempted out from under their damp rocks by humane new
laws. They are dazedly seeking brothers and sisters and cousins which
their President has suddenly given to them from their nation's social
treasure, which was until now untapped."

"You are insane," she said.

"Very likely," I replied. "But it will not be an hallucination when I
see those people outside the fence find each other, if no one else."

"They deserve each other," she said.

"Exactly," I said. "And they deserve something else which is going to
happen to them, now that they have the courage to speak to strangers.
You watch, Sophie. The simple experience of companionship is going to
allow them to climb the evolutionary ladder in a matter of hours or
days, or weeks at most.

"It will not be an hallucination, Sophie," I said, "when I see them
become human beings, after having been for so many years, as you say,
Sophie - centipedes and slugs and earwigs and worms."

Hi ho.














Chapter 37

SOPHIE divorced me, of course, and skeedaddled with her jewelry and
furs and paintings and gold bricks, and so on, to a condominium in
Machu Picchu, Peru.

Almost the last thing I said to her, I think, was this: "Can't you at
least wait until we compile the family directories? You're sure to
find out that you're related to many distinguished women and men."

"I already am related to many distinguished women and men," she
replied. "Goodbye."



In order to compile and publish the family directories, we had to haul
more papers from the National Archives to the powerhouse. I selected
files from the Presidencies of Ulysses Simpson Grant and Warren
Gamaliel Harding this time.

We could not provide every citizen with directories of his or her own.
It was all we could do to ship a complete set to every State House,
town and City Kail, police department, and public library in the land.



One greedy thing I did: Before Sophie left me, I asked that we be sent
Daffodil and Peanut directories all our own. And I have a Daffodil
Directory right here in the Empire State Building right now. Vera
Chipmunk-5 Zappa gave it to me for my birthday last year. It is a
first edition - the only edition ever published.

And I learn from it again that among my new relatives at that time
were Clarence Daffodil-11 Johnson, the Chief of Police of Batavia, New
York, and Muhammad Daffodil-11 X, the former Light-Heavyweight Boxing
Champion of the World, and Maria Daffodil-11 Tcherkassky, the Prima
Ballerina of the Chicago Opera Ballet.



I am glad, in a way, incidentally, that Sophie never saw her family
directory. The Peanuts really did seem to be a ground-hugging bunch.

The most famous Peanut I can now recall was a minor Roller Derby star.

Hi ho.



Yes, and after the Government provided the directories, Free
Enterprise produced family newspapers. Mine was The Daffy-nition.
Sophie's, which continued to arrive at the White House long after she
had left me, was The Goober Gossip. Vera told me the other day that
the Chipmunk paper used to be The Woodpile.

Relatives asked for work or investment capital, or offered things for
sale in the classified ads. The news columns told of triumphs by
various relatives, and warned against others who were child molesters
or swindlers and so on. There were lists of relatives who could be
visited in various hospitals and jails.

There were editorials calling for family health insurance programs and
sports teams and so on. There was one interesting essay, I remember,
either in The Daffy-nition or The Goober Gossip, which said that
families with high moral standards were the best maintainers of law
and order, and that police departments could be expected to fade away.

"If you know of a relative who is engaged in criminal acts," it
concluded, "don't call the police. Call ten more relatives."

And so on.



Vera told me that the motto of The Woodpile used to be this: "A Good
Citizen is a Good Family Woman or a Good Family Man."



As the new families began to investigate themselves, tome statistical
freaks were found. Almost all Pachysandras, for example, could play a
musical instrument, or at least sing in tune. Three of them were
conductors of major symphony orchestras. The widow in Urbana who had
been visited by Chinese was a Pachysandra. She supported herself and
her son by giving piano lessons out there.

Watermelons, on the average, were a kilogram heavier than members of
any other family.

Three-quarters of all Sulfurs were female.

And on and on.

As for my own family: There was an extraordinary concentration of
Daffodils in and around Indianapolis. My family paper was published
out there, and its masthead boasted, "Printed in Daffodil City, U.SA."

Hi ho.



Family clubhouses appeared. I personally cut the ribbon at the opening
of the Daffodil Club here in Manhattan - on Forty-third Street, right
off Fifth Avenue. 

This was a thought-provoking experience for me, even though I was
sedated by tri-benzo-Deportamil. I had once belonged to another club,
and to another sort of artificial extended family, too, on the very
same premises. So had my father, and both my grandfathers, and all
four of my great grandfathers.

Once the building had been a haven for men of power and wealth, and
well-advanced into middle age.

Now it teemed with mothers and children, with old people playing
checkers or chess or dreaming, with younger adults taking dancing
lessons or bowling on the duckpin alleys, or playing the pinball
machines.

I had to laugh.














Chapter 38

IT was on that particular visit to Manhattan that I saw my first
"Thirteen Club" There were dozens of such raffish establishments in
Chicago, I had heard. Now Manhattan had one of it's own.

Eliza and I had not anticipated that all the people with "13" in their
middle names would naturally band together almost immediately, to form
the largest family of all.

And I certainly got a taste of my own medicine when I asked a guard on
the door of the Manhattan Thirteen Club if I could come in and have a
look around. It was very dark in there.

"All due respect, Mr. President," he said to me, "but are you a
Thirteen, sir?"

"No," I said. "You know I'm not."

"Then I must say to you, sir," he said, "what I have to say to you.

"With all possible respect, sir:" he said, "Why don't you take a
flying fuck at a rolling dughnut? Why don't you take a flying fuck at
the mooooooooooooon?"

I was in ecstasy.



Yes, and it was during that visit here that I first learned of The
Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped - then a tiny cult in Chicago,
but destined to become the most popular American religion of all time.

It was brought to my attention by a-leaflet handed to me by a clean
and radiant youth, as I crossed the lobby to the staircase of my
hotel.

He was jerking his head around in what then seemed an eccentric
manner, as though hoping to catch someone peering out at him from
behind a potted palm tree or an easy chair, or even from directly
overhead, from the crystal chandelier.

He was so absorbed in firing ardent glances this way and that, that it
was wholly uninteresting to him that he had just handed a leaflet to
the President of the United States.

"May I ask what you're looking for, young man?" I said.

"For our Saviour, sir," he replied.

"You think He's in this hotel?" I said.

"Read the leaflet, sir," he said.



So I did - in my lonely room, with the radio on.

At the very top of the leaflet was a primitive picture of Jesus,
standing and with His Body facing forward, but with His Face in
profile - like a one-eyed jack in a deck of playing cards.

He was gagged. He was handcuffed. One ankle was shackled and chained
to a ring fixed to the floor. There was a single perfect tear dangling
from the lower lid of His Eye.

Beneath the picture was a series of questions and answers, which went
as follows:


QUESTION: What is your name?

ANSWER: I am the Right Reverend William Uranium- 8 Wainwright, Founder
of the Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped at 3972 Ellis Avenue,
Chicago, Illinois.

QUESTION: When will God send us His Son again?

ANSWER: He already has. Jesus is here among us.

QUESTION: Why haven't we seen or heard anything about Him?

ANSWER: He has been kidnapped by the Forces of Evil.

QUESTION: What must we do?

ANSWER: We must drop whatever we are doing, and spend every waking
hour in trying to find Him. If we do not, Cod will exercise His
Option.

QUESTION: What is God's Option?

ANSWER: He can destroy Mankind so easily, any time he chooses to.


Hi ho.



I saw the young man eating alone in the diningroom that night I
marvelled that he could jerk his head around and still eat without
spilling a drop. He even looked under his plate and water glass for
Jesus not once, but over and over again.

I had to laugh.














Chapter 39

BUT then, just when everything was going so well, when Americans were
happier than they had ever been, even though the country was bankrupt
and falling apart, people began to die by the millions of "The
Albanian Flu" in most places, and here on Manhattan of "The Green
Death."

And that was the end of the Nation. It became families, and nothing
more.

Hi Ho.



Oh, there were claims of Dukedoms and Kingdoms and such garbage, and
armies were raised and forts were built here and there. But few people
admired them. They were just more bad weather and more bad gravity
that families endured from time to time.

And somewhere in there a night of actual bad gravity crumbled the
foundations of Machu Picchu. The condominiums and boutiques and banks
and gold bricks and jewelry and pre-Columbian art collections and the
Opera House and the churches, and all that, eloped down the Andes,
wound up in the sea.

I cried.



And families painted pictures everywhere of the kidnapped Jesus
Christ.



People continued to send news to us at the White House for a little
while. We ourselves were experiencing death and death and death, and
expecting to die.

Our personal hygiene deteriorated quickly. We stopped bathing and
brushing our teeth regularly. The males grew beards, and let their
hair grow down to their shoulders.

We began to cannibalize the White House almost absent-mindedly,
burning furniture and bannisters and paneling and picture frames and
so on in the fireplaces, to keep warm.

Hortense Muskelhunge-13 McBundy, my personal secretary, died of flu.
My valet, Edward Strawberry-4 Kleindienst, died of flu. My
Vice-President, Mildred Helium-20 Theodorides, died of flu.

My science advisor, Dr. Albert Aquamarine-1 Piatigorsky, actually
expired in my arms on the floor of the Oval Office.

He was almost as tall as I was. We must have been quite a sight on the
floor.

"What does it all mean?" he said over and over again.

"I don't know, Albert," I said. "And maybe I'm glad I don't know."

"Ask a Chinaman!" he said, and he went to his reward, as the saying
goes.



Now and then the telephone would ring. It became such a rare
occurrence that I took to answering it personally.

"This is your President speaking," I would say. As like as not, I
would find myself talking over a tenuous, crackling circuit to some
sort of mythological creature - "The King of Michigan," perhaps, or
"The Emergency Governor of Florida," or "The Acting Mayor of
Birmingham," or some such thing.

But there were fewer messages with each passing week. At last there
were none.

I was forgotten.

Thus did my Presidency end - two thirds of the way through my second
term.

And something else crucial was petering out almost as quickly - which
was my irreplaceable supply of tri-benzo-Deportamil.

Hi ho.



I dared not count my remaining pills until I could not help but count
them, they were so few. I had become so dependent upon them, so
grateful for them, that it seemed to me that my life would end when
the last one was gone.

I was running out of employees, too. I was soon down to one. Everybody
else had died or wandered away, since there weren't any messages any
more.

The one person who remained with me was my brother, was faithful
Carlos Daffodil-11 Villavicencio, the dishwasher I had embraced on my
first day as a Daffodil














Chapter 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.

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 coon-skin hat, and
carried a rifle.

"My God, 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."



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 astonishing discovery my
husband, Dr. Felix Baurite-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 participants 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














Chapter 41

I  I was deeply moved, despite tri-benzo- Deportamil.

I stared out at the frontiersman's sweaty horse, which was grazing in
the high grass 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: 

C A P T.   B E R N A R D   O ' H A R E



"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 button from my own tattered lapel, and I pinned it to his.

It said this, of course: 

[graphic of a badge bearing the Amercian flag and the words "Lonesome
No More!"]













Chapter 42

THE frontiersman 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
Washington, 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 nobody 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 (c) 1939, renewed 1966 Leo Feist, Inc., New York, N.Y.












Chapter 43

MELODY and Isadore went down to Wall Street today - to visit Isadora'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 Association 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 "Old
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 knobs with childlike seriousness and ineptitude. 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.

"Hello," 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
Isadora'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 - every time we take our antidote?"

I laughed.

She did not laugh.

"The reason I am not laughing," she said, "is that you, coming along
so unexpectedly, have spoiled a surprise for your birthday."

"How is that?" I said.

She spoke of one of her slaves. "Donna was going to make a present of
this to you. Now you won't be surprised."

"Urn," I said.

"She thought it was an extra-fancy kind of candlestick."



She confided to me that Melody and Isadore had paid her a call earlier
in the week, had told her again how much they hoped to be her slaves
someday.

"I tried to tell 'em that slavery wasn't for everybody," she said.



"Answer me this," she went on, "What happens to all my slaves when I
die?"

" 'Take no thought for the morrow,' " I told her, " 'for the morrow
shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day
is the evil thereof.' "

"Amen," I said.














Chapter 44

OLD Vera and I reminisced there on the townhouse steps about the
Battle of Lake Maxinkuckee, in northern Indiana. I had seen it from a
helicopter on my way to Urbana. Vera had been in the actual thick of
it with her alcoholic husband, Lee Razorclam-13 Zappa. They were cooks
in one of the King of Michigan's field kitchens on the ground below.

"You all looked like ants to me down there," I said, "or like germs
under a microscope." We didn't dare come down close, for fear of being
shot.

"That's what we felt like, too," she said.

"If I had known you then, I would have tried to rescue you," I said.

"That would have been like trying to rescue a germ from a million
other germs, Wilbur," she said.



Not only did Vera have to put up with shells and bullets whistling
over the kitchen tent. She had to defend herself against her husband,
too, who was drunk. He beat her up in the midst of battle.

He blacked both her eyes and broke her jaw. He threw her out through
the tent flaps. She landed on her back in the mud. Then he came out to
explain to her how she could avoid similar beatings in the future.

He came out just in time to be skewered by the lance of an enemy
cavalryman.

"And what's the moral of that story, do you think?" I asked her.

She lay a callused palm on my knee. "Wilbur - don't ever get married,"
she replied.



We talked some about Indianapolis, which I had seen on the same trip,
and where she and her husband had been a waitress and a bartender for
a Thirteen Club - before they joined the army of the King of Michigan.

I asked her what the club was like inside.

"Oh, you know - " she said, "they had stuffed black cats and
jack-o-lanterns, and aces of spades stuck to the tables with daggers
and all. I used to wear net stockings and spike heels and a mask and
all. All the waitresses and the bartenders and the bouncer wore
vampire fangs."

"Um," I said.

"We used to call our hamburgers 'Batburgers,' " she said.

"Uh huh," I said.

"We used to call tomato juice with a shot of gin a "Dracula's
Delight,' " she said.

"Right," I said.

"It was just like a Thirteen Club anywhere," she said, "but it never
went over. Indianapolis just wasn't a big Thirteen town, even though
there were plenty of Thirteens there. It was a Daffodil town. You
weren't anything if you weren't a Daffodil"














Chapter 45

I tell you - I have been regaled as a multimillionaire, as a
pediatrician, as a Senator, and as a President. But nothing can match
for sincerity the welcome Indianapolis, Indiana, gave me as a
Daffodil!

The people there were poor, and had suffered an awful lot of death,
and all the public services had broken down, and they were worried
about battles raging not far away. But they put on parades and feasts
for me, and for Carlos Daffodil-11 Villavicencio, too, of course,
which would have blinded ancient Rome.



Captain Bernard Eagle-1 O'Hare said to me, "My gosh, Mr. President -
if I'd known about this, I would have asked you to make me a
Daffodil."

So I said, "I hereby dub thee a Daffodil."



But the most satisfying and educational thing I saw out there was a
weekly family meeting of Daffodils.

Yes, and I got to vote at that meeting, and so did my pilot, and so
did Carlos, and so did every man, woman, and every child over the age
of nine.

With a little luck, I might even have become Chairperson of the
meeting, although I had been in town for less than a day. The
Chairperson was chosen by lot from all assembled. And the winner of
the drawing that night was an eleven-year-old black girl named Dorothy
Daffodil-7 Garland.

She was fully prepared to run the meeting, and so, I suppose, was
every person there.



She marched up to the lectern, which was nearly as tall as she was.

That little cousin of mine stood on a chair, without any apologies or
self-mockery. She banged the meeting to order with a yellow gavel, and
she told her silenced and respectful relatives, "The President of the
United States is present, as most of you know. With your permission, I
will ask him to say a few words to us at the conclusion of our regular
business.

"Will somebody put that in the form of a motion?" she said.

"I move that Cousin Wilbur be asked to address the meeting at the
conclusion of regular business," said an old man sitting next to me.

This was seconded and put to a voice vote.

The motion carried, but with a scattering of seemingly heartfelt,
by-no-means joshing, "Nays" and "Noes."

Hi ho.



The most pressing business had to do with selecting four replacements
for fallen Daffodils in the army of the King of Michigan, who was at
war simultaneously with Great Lakes pirates and the Duke of Oklahoma.

There was one strapping young man, I remember, a blacksmith, in fact,
who told the meeting, "Send me. There's nothing I'd rather do than
kill me some 'Sooners,' long as they ain't Daffodils." And so on.

To my surprise, he was scolded by several speakers for his military
ardor. He was told that war wasn't supposed to be fun, and in fact
wasn't fun - that tragedy was being discussed, and that he had better
put on a tragic face, or he would be ejected from the meeting.

"Sooners" were people from Oklahoma, and, by extension, anybody in the
service of the Duke of Oklahoma, which included "Show Me's" from
Missouri and "Jayhawkers" from Kansas and "Hawkeyes" from Iowa, and on
and on.

The blacksmith was told that "Sooners" were human beings, too, no
better or worse than "Hoosiers," who were people from Indiana.

And the old man who had moved that I be allowed to speak later on got
up and said this: "Young man, you're no better than the Albanian
influenza or The Green Death, if you can kill for joy."



I was impressed. I realized that nations could never acknowledge their
own wars as tragedies, but that families not only could but had to.

Bully for them!



The chief reason the blacksmith was not allowed to go to war, though,
was that he had so far fathered three illegitimate children by
different women, "and had two more in the oven," as someone said.

He wasn't going to be allowed to run away from caring for all those
babies.














Chapter 46

EVEN the children and the drunks and the lunatics at that meeting
seemed shrewdly familiar with parliamentary procedures. The little
girl behind the lectern kept things moving so briskly and purposefully
that she might have been some sort of goddess up there, equipped with
an armload of thunderbolts.

I was so filled with respect for these procedures, which had always
seemed like such solemn tomfoolery to me before.



And I am still so respectful, that I have just looked up their
inventor in my Encyclopaedia here in the Empire State Building.

His name was Henry Martyn Robert. He was a graduate of West Point. He
was an engineer. He became a general by and by. But, just before the
Civil War, when he was a lieutenant stationed in New Bedford,
Massachusetts, he had to run a church meeting, and he lost control of
it.

There were no rules.

So this soldier sat down and wrote some rules, which were the
identical rules I saw followed in Indianapolis. They were published as
Robert's Rules of Order, which I now believe to be one of the four
greatest inventions by Americans.

The other three, in my opinion, were The Bill of Rights, the
principles of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the artificial extended
families envisioned by Eliza and me.



The three recruits which the Indianapolis Daffodils finally voted to
send off to the King of Michigan, incidentally, were all people who
could be most easily spared, and who, in the opinion of the voters,
had had the most carefree lives so far.

Hi ho.



The next order of business had to do with feeding and sheltering
Daffodil refugees, who were trickling into town from all the fighting
in the northern part of the state.

The meeting again discouraged an enthusiast. A young woman, quite
beautiful but disorderly, and clearly crazed by altruism, said that
she could take at least twenty refugees into her home.

Somebody else got up and said to her that she was such an incompetent
housekeeper that her own children had gone to live with other
relatives.

Another person pointed out to her that she was so absent-minded that
her dog would have starved to death, if it weren't for neighbors, and
that she had accidentally set fire to her house three times.



This sounds as though the people at the meeting were being cruel. But
they all called her "Cousin Grace" or "Sister Grace," as the case
might be. She was my cousin too, of course. She was a Daffodil-13.

What was more: She was a menace only to herself, so nobody was
particularly mad at her. Her children had wandered off to better-run
houses almost as soon as they were able to walk, I was told. That was
surely one of the most attractive features of Eliza's and my
invention, I think: Children had so many homes and parents to choose
from.

Cousin Grace, for her part, heard all the bad reports on herself as
though they were surprising to her, but no doubt true. She did not
flee in tears. She stayed for the rest of the meeting, obeying
Robert's Rules of Order, and looking sympathetic and alert.

At one point, under "New Business," Cousin Grace made a motion that
any Daffodil who served with the Great Lakes Pirates or in the army of
the Duke of Oklahoma should be expelled from the family.

Nobody would second this.

And the little girl running the meeting told her, "Cousin Grace, you
know as well as anybody here, 'Once a Daffodil, always a Daffodil' "














Chapter 47

It was at last my turn to speak. "Brothers and Sisters and Cousins - "
I said, "your nation has wasted away. As you can see, your President
has also become a shadow of his former shadow. You have nobody but
your doddering Cousin Wilbur here."

"You were a damn good President, Brother Billy," somebody called from
the back of the room.

"I would have liked to give my country peace as well as brotherhood
and sisterhood," I went on. "There is no peace, I'm sorry to say. We
find it. We lose it We find it again. We lose it again. Thank God, at
least, that the machines have decided not to fight any more. It's just
people now.

"And thank God that there's no such thing as a battle between
strangers any more. I don't care who fights who - everybody will have
relatives on the other side."



Most of the people at the meeting were not only Daffodils, but also
searchers for the kidnapped Jesus. It was a disconcerting sort of
audience to address, I found. No matter what I said, they kept jerking
their heads this way and that, hoping to catch sight of Jesus.

But I seemed to be getting across, for they applauded or cheered at
appropriate moments - so I pressed on.



"Because we're just families, and not a nation any more," I said,
"it's much easier for us to give and receive mercy in war."

"I have just come from observing a battle far to the north of here, in
the region of Lake Maxinkuckee. It was horses and spears and rifles
and knives and pistols, and a cannon or two. I saw several people
killed. I also saw many people embracing, and there seemed to be a
great deal of deserting and surrendering going on.

This much news I can bring you from the Battle of Lake Maxinkuckee:" I
said -

"It is no massacre."














Chapter 48

WHILE in Indianapolis, I received an invitation by radio from the King
of Michigan. It was Napoleonic in tone. It said that the King would be
pleased "to hold an audience for the President of the United States in
his Summer Palace on Lake Maxinkuckee." It said that his sentinels had
been instructed to grant me safe passage. It said that the battle was
over. "Victory is ours," it said.

So my pilot and I flew there.

We left my faithful servant, Carlos Daffodil-11 Villavicencio, to
spend his declining years among his countless relatives.

"Good luck, Brother Carlos," I said.

"Home at last, Meester President, me Brudder," he replied. "Tanks you
and tanks God for everything. Lonesome no more!"



My meeting with the King of Michigan would have been called an
"historic occasion" in olden times. There would have been cameras and
microphones and reporters there. As it was, there were notetakers
there, whom the King called his "scribes."

And he was right to give those people with pens and paper that archaic
title. Most of his soldiers could scarcely read or write.



Captain O'Hare and I landed on the manicured lawn before the King's
Summer Palace, which had been a private military academy at one time.
Soldiers, who had behaved badly in the recent battle, I suppose, were
on their knees everywhere, guarded by military policemen. They were
cutting grass with bayonets and pocket knives and scissors - as a
punishment.



Captain O'Hare and I entered the palace between two lines of soldiers.
They were an honor guard of some sort, I suppose. Each one held aloft
a banner, which was embroidered with the totem of his artificial
extended family - an apple, an alligator, the chemical symbol for
lithium, and so on.

It was such a comically trite historical situation, I thought. Aside
from battles, the history of nations seemed to consist of nothing but
powerless old poops like myself, heavily medicated and vaguely beloved
in the long ago, coming to kiss the boots of young psychopaths.

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-Deportarnil was making
me soign? and blas?, 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."














Chapter 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, Wihna 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 pipe, 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 re- "-. stored 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.

"Um," 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.

"Lake 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-Depotamil 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 communal 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's 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.

And she was in fact captured when a six-year-old - after the Battle of
Iowa City, in which her father and mother were slain.

Hi ho.



Yes, and the King of Michigan had become so decadent by then, that he
maintained a seraglio of captured children with the same middle name
as his - which, of course, was Oriole-2. Little Melody was added to
that pitiful zoo.

But, as her ordeals became more disgusting, so did she gain increasing
inner strength from her father's dying words to her, which were these:

"You are a princess. You are the granddaughter of the King of
Candlesticks, of the King of New York."

Hi ho.



And then, one night, she stole the Dresden candlestick from the tent
of the sleeping King.

Then Melody crawled under the flaps of the tent and into the moonlit
world outside.



Thus began her incredible journey eastward, ever eastward, in search
of her legendary grandfather. His palace was one of the tallest
buildings in the world.

She would encounter relatives everywhere - if not Orioles, then at
least birds or living things of some kind.

They would feed her and point the way.

One would give her a raincoat. Another would give her a sweater and a
magnetic compass. Another would give her a baby carriage. Another
would give her an alarm clock.

Another would give her a needle and thread, and a gold thimble, too.

Another would row her across the Harlem River to the Island of Death,
at the risk of his own life.

And so on.


- Das Ende -



by the same author

Player Piano
The Sirens of Titan
Canary in a Cathouse
Mother Night
Cat's Cradle
God Bless You, Mr Rosewater
Welcome to the Monkey House
Slaugtherhouse-Five
Happy Birthday, Wanda June
Breakfast of Champions
Wampeter Foma & Granfalloons


First published in Great Britain 1976
Copyright (c) 1976 by Kurt Vonnegut

Jonathan Cape Ltd, 30 Bedford Square, London WC1

Grateful acknowledgment is extended to Al Hirschfield, 
Who is represented exclusively by The Margo Feiden Galleries,
New York City, for permission to reproduce the illustration
On the dedication page.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Vonnegut, Kurt
Slapstick, or Lonesome no more?
ISBN 0-224-01432-4
1. Title
823'.9'1F  PS3752.05

Printed in Great Britain by litho by The Anchor Press Ltd
And bound by Wm Brendon & Son Ltd
Both of Tiptree, Essex