Slapstick Or Lonesome No More! Part 9

30.

I AGREED TO TAKE AGREED TO TAKE Fu Manchu out to the mausoleum. I put him in my breast pocket. 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 pa.s.sageways, 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 cras.h.i.+ng, s.h.i.+ps 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. 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 sh.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sed, 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 G.o.d, 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, c.o.ked 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 pa.s.sion, 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. 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 b.u.t.ton 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, wis.h.i.+ng 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 skysc.r.a.pers 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 kind 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?"