Wonder of the Worlds

by Sesh Heri

  The two men went to the door. The blank-faced man stopped and turned around. “Oh,” the blank-faced man said, “and Professor. Don’t discuss this with anyone. And I mean anyone. You understand?” The professor looked up.

  “I understand, young man.”

  The blank-faced man studied the professor’s face a moment, and then turned back to the door. “Oh—and young man,” the professor said. The blank-faced man stopped and looked back.

  “Don’t ever question my patriotism,” the professor said. “About anything. And I mean anything. Do you understand?” “Just read the words, Professor,” the blank-faced man said, and then he turned along with his associate and the two men went out.

  The professor felt as if a pressure had been released in the room. He ex- haled and took another breath. Then he looked down at the manuscript and thought: What the hell is this all about? He picked up his magnifying glass and

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  studied the paper again, noting its yellow-brown edges. Other than that, it was in pristine condition.

  The professor lay his magnifying glass aside, rose from his desk, and went to the window. He saw the two men who had been in his office walking away across the campus. They walked stiff ly, with a military precision. The professor shook his head and sank into an armchair near the window. He took out his reading glasses, perched them on his nose, and looked down at the manuscript in his lap. The professor began to read, and, as he read, he could not help hearing the sound of the words in his head. It was a voice talking easy and slow, the long, pulled-out sounds of sweet taffy… .

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Typesetter

  As near as I can make out, geniuses think they know it all, and so won’t take people’s advice, but always go their own way, which makes everybody forsake and despise them, and that is perfectly natural. If they was humbler, and listened and tried to learn, it would be better for them.

  — Huck, Tom Sawyer Abroad

  Everybody was coming to Chicago for the fair that spring of 1893. In fact, it seemed like the whole world was coming, which was only natural, I suppose, considering that it was called “The World’s Fair.”

  It was to commemorate the 400th year since the discovery of America by Columbus. The fair was a year late. But what is the difference of a year or two after you have waited four hundred? Even Methusalah would not have quibbled over that. They said the fair was a wonder, and I suppose it was, too. But they also said it was a wonder that Columbus had discovered America. I would argue that. Considering the size of America, it seems to me that it would have been a wonder had he come this way and missed it. The fair did not only seem to contain all the people in the world, but every thing that was in the world as well. So it was a world unto itself. Its parts shifted and turned, clattered and clamored, up, down, in, out, over, under, round and round. And all those parts were driven by—the Machine—the usurper god of our age. But this was not the machine forged by our fathers’ hands; its blood was not water and its breath was not steam. The Machine of the Columbian Quaternary had veins of copper, and along them flowed a mysterious, new blood—electricity.

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  Of course, electricity had always been known to a select few through- out the generations of the human race. The ancient Egyptians at Edfu built lightning rods long before Franklin ever f lew his kite. But the world’s golden sages knew how to keep a secret. So when—four hundred years ago—Columbus observed ball lightning on the mast of his ship, he could only call it “St. Elmo’s Fire,” which only shows that just because someone can be right about one thing there is no reason he cannot be ignorant of just about ever ything else. Columbus was right about the round world, but he mistook America for India and electricity for a miracle. The dis- crepancies shouted from the treetops, but Columbus had his one truth and to all others he was deaf. It was easy for our generation to scoff and feel superior, but we were no different from Columbus; he knew how to make a circuit of the world, we knew how to make a circuit of electricity. The fair, in showing us the truth or two we knew, shouted at us the world of truths we still had not seen or heard. But, of course, as usual, most of us were not listening. The fair was spread out over a mile, north to south, along the shore of Lake Michigan, and it reached inland about a mile to the west along a narrow stretch of ground that was called the “Midway Plaisance,” a giant carnival unlike any the world had ever seen up until then. Along its magic avenue sprawled what seemed to be every country on the face of the globe, and if one country did not suit you, you need not bother with a steamship passage or a railroad trip—another country was only a step away. There was an Eskimo village and a South Sea village; there were the castles of Germany and the pagodas of Japan; there were the streets of Cairo where you could wind your way around on the back of a camel; there was an Algerian village with a “cultural exhibition” of the danse du ventre—the belly dance, otherwise known as the Dance of the Seven Veils, or, as the vulgar referred to it, the “Hoochie-Koochie” (roughly translated: “By George, would you look at that?”) It seemed like every gentleman who stepped into the Alge- rian village suddenly got a strong hankering for some cultural exposure. Some got several exposures until their wives pronounced them “overexposed” and put an end to their cultural development with a parasol tap to the back of the head, a tap which would send the gentleman’s bowler down over his eyes—a sort of Dance of the Eighth Veil. The major portions of the grounds lay parallel to the shore of the lake. It was here that sumptuous marble palaces rose up splendidly to the sky—only they were not really marble; they were really only frameworks of timber cov- ered over with sheets of “staff”—plasterboard. Outside them, you might think you had wandered into Athens or Rome or Venice or some other place that had never existed before, except in a dream. Inside them—well, inside them, they looked something like a barn. But, then, nobody seemed to notice.

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  Maybe the reason nobody noticed the inside of the fair’s buildings was because of what those building walls contained—a collection of the world’s superlatives: the oldest, the newest, the biggest, the smallest, the fastest, the slowest. If the relics of George Washington, the Tombs of the Bastille, or the dungeons of the Inquisition did not make you want to crane your neck, a 3,000 year-old 312 foot high Mammoth Redwood carted all the way from California would make you wish you were a giraffe. Over in the Hall of Agriculture there was an eleven ton block of cheese, enough to feed a World Congress of Rats and most of their relatives. When the rats finished feasting on the cheese, they could top off on a 1,500 pound chocolate Venus de Milo, and it would be good that it was a Venus de Milo because that rat congress would have no room left for the arms. Everybody clustered and crowded, squeezed and poked, stepped on and stepped up to see—to see—what they had never seen before in their lives! People had not come to see the elephant—but to see a dynamo the size of two elephants—a locomotive the size of twenty elephants—a battleship of steel that could transport a hundred elephants and still have room for an inaugural ball and a baseball game. People had come to have the wind knocked out of them by the gigantic power of the electrical machine. In the Midway Plaisance, people would plunge on the incline of the scenic railway, gasping for breath. Everyone began calling it “the rollercoaster,” and they were riding it to beat all hell into the Twentieth Century. To balance this raucous atmosphere, the organizers of the fair sought a weight. Someone decided that the one thing that could slow down all that breathless dipping and plunging could be expressed by one weighty word— religion. “Yes,” someone said, “let’s have some—religion!” And, of course, it being a world’s fair, they could not be satisfied with just one religion, or even a handful. A handful of Presbyterians, Catholics, and Mormons could no more quell that world tide of human passion than a fan could cool Hades. No, the only solution—from an engineering standpoint—was to bring in all the world’s religions, yes, a “World Congress of Religions!” And so they did. Three years later, when I visited India, I found peo
ple there who had heard about the World Congress of Religions and thought that Chicago was a Holy City. I did not have the heart to expurgate their theology. The fair had brought forth a congress of another kind as well—not of holy men—but of harlots, whoremongers, and hell-raisers. Every pickpocket, card- sharp, and confidence man in the country was converging on the fair. The police commissioner and the mayor, studying that Hell-Congress, concluded that while vice could not be eradicated, it could be regulated and put on a sound financial footing. All members of the Hell-Congress were warned off the fairgrounds and admonished to conduct all their business downtown—at least all that was of a publicly perceivable nature. The admonishment had its

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  effect. The fair had the placid air of a Sunday-school picnic, even if, around the corner, behind the board fence, the devil was still working his old stand with both of his left hands.

  The people of Chicago would not want this News distributed about, be- cause they believe they are the best people, so much so that every time a citizen of Chicago goes to hell, Satan has to explain that the Chicago people are not the best down there, merely the most numerous. But whether with sinners, saints, or Sunday-only sanctifiers, Chicago was filling up fast that spring with people from all four corners of the globe, and from two or three other corners no one even knew existed. They were coming in sarongs and in turbans, in wooden shoes and in sandals, wrapped in fur and wrapped in— maybe something resembling a diaper. It was hard on the eyes to gaze on all that variety at once, occasionally hard on the nose to smell it. Yes, you could see the whole world there, and smell it, too. When you did, you knew the world was real, that you were a part of it, and, because of that, the world was you.

  The best place to take in your view of the world was atop the monster-sized pleasure wheel designed by George Ferris. Situated at the center of the Mid- way, its sky-cabins rose 250 feet in the air along the rim of the giant wheel. Each sky-cabin could carry 60 passengers. You could stand in one of those sky- cabins as it rose in the air, and look out its windows, and watch the world drop away at your feet. The people below would become midgets—then mites, while the trees and buildings and telegraph poles would shrink down and become a toy-land made for the habitation of dolls. From the top you could see: to the north, the steeples, smokestacks, and skyscraping towers of downtown Chi- cago; to the west and south, the open plains of Illinois; to the east, the fairy- land of white domes and towers which were the fair’s exhibition buildings— and among the glimmering white buildings you could see blue lagoons and canals dotted green with wooded islands—and—if you looked close enough— you could see boats plying their way along those canals as if lost in some 400 year-old Venetian dream. Further away, perhaps half a mile, you could glimpse another kind of movement: little black specks sliding along the lakeside pier. These would be the passengers on the electric moving sidewalk. Beyond the pier, you would see only the blue waters of Lake Michigan, twinkling white sparks of sunlight, twinkling and stretching off to the horizon so that—if you didn’t know better—it would seem you were gazing off to an infinite sea at the edge of the world. Notice that I say, “You could see such-and-such,” because—I never did. I had hoped to ride the big wheel to the top and be delighted with the view like everybody else. But all I know about that view is second-hand information. I never got up there. It is the purpose of this narrative to tell you why. The story I have told to the world, to my friends, and to my family about my stay in Chicago in 1893 is a lie. It was not my first lie. I do not recall my first

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  lie, it was too far back. But this was probably the best lie I ever told for size and construction and detail of duplicity. It was a lie told with great art, craftsman- ship, and mature skill. It was a lie that reached neither too high nor too low, but kept its claims modest and temperate and went off on no tangents of boasting. And thus it was a lie destined to be believed as iron-clad Truth, and thus so sturdy and strong it could have served as the basis of a new religion, if it needed to serve in that capacity, which it didn’t. I will also note that it was a necessary lie, the kind of lie that keeps the world’s wheels greased and turning and keeps us all happy and satisfied. It was a masterful lie, but, as lies go, not a very big lie, for it was not about general principles, or geometry, or metaphysics. I was not up to manufacturing those kinds of quality lies. No, this lie was only about something I did, or did not do, I should say. My lie had one main theme, and it was this: that while I was in Chicago I had a cold and lay in bed and nursed it nearly the whole time. This main theme was so simple that it took care of a lot of loose ends that usually dangle around the edges of common, ordinary lies. If it had not been for that main theme, I would have had to come up with a lot more little lies to hide all those dangling loose ends. But as it was, to any inquiry about my stay in Chicago all I had to do was reply, “Oh, how I was sick! Sick, sick, sick, the whole blamed time!” And that ended it right there. That lopped off all those loose ends right at their base; for who wants to hear about somebody being sick? I am sure you can see the simple genius in this lie, but I’ll confess here that I cannot take full credit for it. Another person was the author of the main theme of my lie. I don’t mind admitting that, for the author of my lie’s main theme could out-lie me any day of the week. Amateur liars such as I am have no chance of compet- ing against professional liars such as the author of my main theme. But I am getting ahead of myself. To tell a lie is easy; to tell the truth is hard. That is probably why the truth is so seldom told. The truth is a precious commodity; let us economize it. I will try to tell the truth here. I will tell the truth here, to the best of my ability, but the truth with a small t. I know it will be the truth with a small t, because while most of what I have to tell I experienced first-hand, the rest is hear-say pro- vided by people whom I trust implicitly—as you shall see. When I tell their part of the story I am relying on their testimony and filling in what I did not witness or experience with what I imagine was the most likely course of events. But is this not exactly what our historians do in their books? Only they do not admit that the knowledge-gaps in their books are patched up with their own inven- tions. No, that is when they put in a footnote. You see, those footnotes are there to throw you off, to distract you from the patchwork. Actually, I do not believe any stor y has ever been told with a capitol T kind of truth. The theologians tell us the Bible is true—and it is, but only in

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  a small t kind of way. The gospel had to be told four times and even then the authors could not get all their facts straight—not one gospel completely agrees with another. Now, if that thought offends you, you should not be reading this anyway. You should be reading your Bible, because it is clear to me you have not been reading your Bible. Start with the genealogies and compare them generation by generation. You will see they do not match up. For those of you who have no religion, I ask you to read the Congressional Record, your Newspaper, or a letter sent to you by anyone. Read it slow, stay awake—and think. You will realize a truth about Truth: You are reading small t literature. So—if you want to know what “really” happened to me back there in Chicago in 1893, that is, my own small t version of events—then read on. I figure you will read on, because if you have managed to lay your hands on this manuscript, you probably are the kind of person who has some small t truths of your own, truths that nobody else knows about, truths that nobody else would believe. In fact, if you are reading this, I most likely have been dead a century or two, and it does not matter to me if you like, dislike, believe or disbelieve any of my small t truths. I speak from the grave, and from the grave I am sublimely indifferent to your opinion, or the opinion of anyone else. So read on and contemplate, and after you have read this, you can scratch your head and wonder, “Could it be? Is it true?” To which I would reply, “Of course it’s true—in a small t kind of way.” But I do not think I have strayed very far from the facts. We were all interviewed by President Grover Cleveland in 1893, and again by a secret gov
ernment commission in 1902 in the aftermath of the assassination of Presi- dent McKinley. I have heard that a few of the facts of “The Chicago Incident of 93” (as it is called by certain parties in Washington) have been withheld from some of our highest elected officials, including President Roosevelt. I find it hard to believe that President Roosevelt does not have all the facts in hand, although I have never spoken to him about these matters, so I cannot say for certain. When we enter the Mirror House of State Secrets, it is almost impos- sible to tell who knows what and how much. It is also impossible to tell which small t version of events is the Truth. But are we not back around the barn at where we started? During the 1902 governmental inquiry it was requested by the commission that I write a secret history of 1893 for safe-keeping in their archives, but I declined due to financial and personal concerns. I have now settled most of those concerns for good or ill and now feel an urge to set down the events of 1893 in my own small t way. Whether I will submit this account to the govern- ment, keep it for my heirs and assigns, or burn it—I have not yet decided. While riding the big pleasure wheel had been on my mind that spring of 1893, it was not my reason for being in Chicago. I had left my family behind in

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  Florence, Italy to come back to America to take the helm of my sinking financial ship. This was during the awful bank panic of ’93 and about a year before the humiliating bankruptcy of all my business concerns.

  It is best we do not know the future, for we often could not bear the present. At the moment, however, in my blessed ignorance of the future, my spirits were high, although, from time to time, I felt a foreboding, like a pres- sure on my head trying to push me down. But I was not going to let it. After spending a short time back east in New York, my business associate Fred Hall and I boarded a train for Chicago. It seemed to me that our train was the slowest and oldest in the United States. I asked the conductor if it had been in the War. He said he did not think so. That was before his time, he said, for he was only a boy back in the 60’s. I said, no, I did not mean the Civil War, I meant the Revolutionary. He did not seem to think that was so funny, and went on his way. When we pulled into Chicago’s Polk Street Station, Hall and I stepped out of the car and on to the station platform, and Hall stretched his arms out in front of him and took a deep breath. “Smell that,” Hall said.