Mr. Eternity by Aaron Thier Read Free Book Online Page B

Babylon plantation, when slave and master would pull together in this labor of making ratt leather, and all would live as brothers. It would be a heaven on earth, said he, a heaven of ratts.
    I had no part of all this, and simply enjoyed myself upon my veranda, sometimes in company of Dr. Dan and sometimes alone. I slept well, for the fatigues of an industrious life are as nothing compared with the fatigues of roguery. I drank tea and burned foetid material of all descriptions to drive off the moskitos and black flies. I chew’d crude opium, which I found among my predecessors effects. I sweated & ate & sweated, no one ever asking how my work went, and therefore I felt proud, as if I were working hard, and getting ahead at last. Plantation life, dear Reader. Shaded verandas, rum in punch, moskitos & cotton trees & long afternoons of the rainy season, shuddering fevers & a prospect of blue water, the shade of the plantane walk on a March evening clear as glass. I own it is not a bad life at all, as long as you are a white man.

2500
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    Not long after he purchased Daniel Defoe, my father announced a five-year remodernization plan for St. Louis. He promulgated an edict to this effect, and then, in an example of aspirational governance, he declared by presidential decree that our country would henceforth be known as the Reunited States of America. He said that we had been wandering in an exodus of poverty, but now he would usher forth a golden age. He levied fresh taxes, reimposed the ancient system of weights, and seized the sesame presses so he could distribute the oil on a ration system. In order to infuse all of this with credence, he also manumitted Daniel Defoe and made him Vice-Secretary of Remodernization, for he was persuaded that Daniel Defoe carried in his mind the whole accumulated knowledge of history. He himself, of course, was Preeminent Secretary of every government office.
    For some time he was awash with invigorated curiosities, and he even did some studying again, although he only read his economics book. He would invite his rich hereditary friends to the palace and discourse to them about economic opportunity, fiscal growth dynamics, capital gains, and free trade laissez-faire global market liberalization. “We will reconquer the whole continent,” he would say. “But we will do it economically.” One night he hung an expansive map of the United States on the ballroom wall and he said, “That is our goal.” But it was only an approximate goal, because the shape of the continent was much altered from what it had been. Instead of the old state of Louisiana, there was a shallow bay called the Delta Bay, and Florida was lost beneath the sighing seas, and the Bahamas as well, and also the cities of the Atlantic littoral. This at least was what we gleaned from travelers.
    As for me, I repudiated the whole idea. I repudiated the patriarchalstate itself. But I didn’t bother saying so to my father, who never listened to me. The only person in whom I confided my true heart was Edward Halloween, who was our palace clown and my own principal friend. We stood together in the clamorous rabble-house of a ballroom, full of shouting bureaucrats and vice-secretaries, and we looked at this ancient map, which sang a song of nostalgia but told us nothing about our current political and territorial realities. Cartography was a vanquished art.
    “It is like looking into the eye of our insignificance,” I said. “Missouri is just a remote fraction of the whole. What goes on at a place like California?”
    “Daniel Defoe says it is gone to desert,” said Edward Halloween. “But he also says he knows a sorcerer named Quaco who can transmute dreams into woolen cloth, so we can’t trust everything he says.”
    We only had good intelligence about our own territorial neighborhood. Across the river was the Mississippi Democratic Confederacy, which we called the MDC. It combined parts of Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee.