*
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.
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.
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.
30
I AGREED TO TAKE Fu Manchu o
ut 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."
"Um," 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.
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.
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.
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:
*
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.
Slapstick or Lonesome No More! Page 8
