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.S.A."
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.
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 its 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 doughnut? 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, God 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.
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 Muskellunge-13 McBundy, my personal secretary, died of flu. My valet, Edward Straw-berry-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.
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 Bauxite-13 von Peterswald, made just before he died. My son, who is incidentally a Daffodil-11, like yourself, and I have kept this discovery a secret ever since, because the light it throws on the situation of human beings in the Universe is very demoralizing, to say the least. It has to do with the true nature of what awaits us all after death. What awaits us, Dr. Swain, is tedious in the extreme.
"I can't bring myself to call it 'Heaven' or 'Our Just Reward,' or any of those sweet things. All I can call it is what my husband came to call it, and what you will call it, too, after you have investigated it, which is 'The Turkey Farm.'
"In short, Dr. Swain, my husband discovered a way to talk to dead people on The Turkey Farm. He never taught the technique to me or my son, or to anybody. But the Chinese, who apparently have spies everywhere, somehow found out about it. They came to study his journals and to see what was left of his apparatus.
"After they had figured it out, they were nice enough to explain to my son and me how we might do the gruesome trick, if we wished to. They themselves were disappointed with the discovery. It was new to them, they said, but could be 'interesting only to 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.
41
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: CAPT. BERNARD O'HARE
*
"Captain," I said, "you're another one who doesn't seem to go in for the new-fangled middle names." I noticed, too, that he was much too old to be only a captain, even if there had still been such a thing. He was in fact almost sixty.
I concluded that he was a lunatic who had found the costume somewhere. I supposed that he had become so elated and addled by his new appearance, that nothing would do but that he show himself off to his President.
The truth was, though, that he was perfectly sane. He had been stationed for the past eleven years in the bottom of a secret, underground silo in Rock Creek Park. I had never heard of the silo before.
But there was a Presidential helicopter concealed in it, along with thousands of gallons of absolutely priceless gasoline.
*
He had come out at last, in violation of his orders, he said, to find out "what on Earth was going on."
I had to laugh.
*
"Is the helicopter still ready to fly?" I asked.
"Yes, sir, it is," he said. He had been maintaining it single-handedly for the past two years. His mechanics had wandered off one-by-one.
"Young man," I said, "I'm going to give you a medal for this." I took a button from my own tattered lapel, and I pinned it to his.
It said this, of course:
42
THE FRONTIERSMAN refused a similar decoration. He asked for food, instead--to sustain him on his long trip back to his native mount
ains.
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,
Slapstick or Lonesome No More! Page 10
