Slapstick or Lonesome No More! Read online

  *

  For my own part, though: It would have been catastrophic if I had forgotten my sister at once. I had never told her so, but she was the person I had always written for. She was the secret of whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved. She was the secret of my technique. Any creation which has any wholeness and harmoniousness, I suspect, was made by an artist or inventor with an audience of one in mind.

  Yes, and she was nice enough, or Nature was nice enough, to allow me to feel her presence for a number of years after she died--to let me go on writing for her. But then she began to fade away, perhaps because she had more important business elsewhere.

  Be that as it may, she had vanished entirely as my audience by the time Uncle Alex died.

  So the seat between my brother and me on the airplane seemed especially vacant to me. I filled it as best I could--with that morning's issue of The New York Times.

  *

  While my brother and I waited for the plane to take off for Indianapolis, he made me a present of a joke by Mark Twain--about an opera Twain had seen in Italy. Twain said that he hadn't heard anything like it "... since the orphanage burned down."

  We laughed.

  *

  He asked me politely how my work was going. I think he respects but is baffled by my work.

  I said that I was sick of it, but that I had always been sick of it. I told him a remark which I had heard attributed to the writer Renata Adler, who hates writing, that a writer was a person who hated writing.

  I told him, too, what my agent, Max Wilkinson, wrote to me after I complained again about what a disagreeable profession I had. This was it: "Dear Kurt--I never knew a blacksmith who was in love with his anvil."

  We laughed again, but I think the joke was partly lost on my brother. His life has been an unending honeymoon with his anvil.

  *

  I told him that I had been going to operas recently, and that the set for the first act of Tosca had looked exactly like the interior of Union Station in Indianapolis to me. While the actual opera was going on, I said, I daydreamed about putting track numbers in the archways of the set, and passing out bells and whistles to the orchestra, and staging an opera about Indianapolis during the Age of the Iron Horse.

  "People from our great-grandfathers' generation would mingle with our own, when we were young--" I said, "and all the generations in between. Arrivals and departures would be announced. Uncle Alex would leave for his job as a spy in Baltimore. You would come home from your freshman year at M.I.T.

  "There would be shoals of relatives," I said, "watching the travelers come and go--and black men to carry the luggage and shine the shoes."

  *

  "Every so often in my opera," I said, "the stage would turn mud-colored with uniforms. That would be a war.

  "And then it would clear up again."

  *

  After the plane took off, my brother showed me a piece of scientific apparatus which he had brought along. It was a photoelectric cell connected to a small tape recorder. He aimed the electric eye at clouds. It perceived lightning flashes which were invisible to us in the dazzle of daytime.

  The secret flashes were recorded as clicks by the recorder. We could also hear the clicks as they happened--on a tiny earphone.

  "There's a hot one," my brother announced. He indicated a distant cumulus cloud, a seeming Pike's Peak of whipped cream.

  He let me listen to the clicks. There were two quick ones, then some silence, then three quick ones, then silence again.

  "How far away is that cloud?" I asked him.

  "Oh--a hundred miles, maybe," he said.

  I thought it was beautiful that my big brother could detect secrets so simply from so far away.

  *

  I lit a cigarette.

  Bernard doesn't smoke any more, because it is so important that he live a good while longer. He still has two little boys to raise.

  *

  Yes, and while my big brother meditated about clouds, the mind I was given daydreamed the story in this book. It is about desolated cities and spiritual cannibalism and incest and loneliness and lovelessness and death, and so on. It depicts myself and my beautiful sister as monsters, and so on.

  This is only natural, since I dreamed it on the way to a funeral.

  *

  It is about this terribly old man in the ruins of Manhattan, you see, where almost everyone has been killed by a mysterious disease called "The Green Death."

  He lives there with his illiterate, rickety, pregnant little granddaughter, Melody. Who is he really? I guess he is myself--experimenting with being old.

  Who is Melody? I thought for a while that she was all that remained of my memory of my sister. I now believe that she is what I feel to be, when I experiment with old age, all that is left of my optimistic imagination, of my creativeness.

  Hi ho.

  *

  The old man is writing his autobiography. He begins it with words which my late Uncle Alex told me one time should be used by religious skeptics as a prelude to their nightly prayers.

  These are the words: "To whom it may concern."

  1

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

  It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

  Smoke from a cooking fire on the terrazzo floor of the lobby of the Empire State Building on the Island of Death floats out over the ailanthus jungle which Thirty-fourth Street has become.

  The pavement on the floor of the jungle is all crinkum-crankum-heaved this way and that by frost-heaves and roots.

  There is a small clearing in the jungle. A blue-eyed, lantern-jawed old white man, who is two meters tall and one hundred years old, sits in the clearing on what was once the back seat of a taxicab.

  I am that man.

  My name is Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain.

  *

  I am barefoot. I wear a purple toga made from draperies found in the ruins of the Americana Hotel.

  I am a former President of the United States of America. I was the final President, the tallest President, and the only one ever to have been divorced while occupying the White House.

  I inhabit the first floor of the Empire State Building with my sixteen-year-old granddaughter, who is Melody Oriole-2 von Peterswald, and with her lover, Isadore Raspberry-19 Cohen. The three of us have the building all to ourselves.

  Our nearest neighbor is one and one-half kilometers away.

  I have just heard one of her roosters crow.

  *

  Our nearest neighbor is Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa, a woman who loves life and is better at it than anyone I ever knew. She is a strong and warm-hearted and hard-working farmer in her early sixties. She is built like a fireplug. She has slaves whom she treats very well. And she and the slaves raise cattle and pigs and chickens and goats and corn and wheat and vegetables and fruits and grapes along the shores of the East River.

  They have built a windmill for grinding grain, and a still for making brandy, and a smokehouse--and on and on.

  "Vera--" I told her the other day, "if you would only write us a new Declaration of Independence, you would be the Thomas Jefferson of modern times."

  *

  I write this book on the stationery of the Continental Driving School, three boxes of which Melody and Isadore found in a closet on the sixty-fourth floor of our home. They also found a gross of ball-point pens.

  *

  Visitors from the mainland are rare. The bridges are down. The tunnels are crushed. And boats will not come near us, for fear of the plague peculiar to this island, which is called "The Green Death."

  And it is that plague which has earned Manhattan the sobriquet, "The Island of Death."

  Hi ho.

  *

  It is a thing I often say these days: "Hi ho." It is a kind of senile hiccup. I have lived too long.

  Hi ho.

  *

  The gravity is very light today. I have an erection as a result of that. All males have erections on days like this. They
are automatic consequences of near-weightlessness. They have little to do with eroticism in most cases, and nothing to do with it in the life of a man my age. They are hydraulic experiences--the results of confused plumbing, and little more.

  Hi ho.

  *

  The gravity is so light today, that I feel as though I might scamper to the top of the Empire State Building with a manhole cover, and fling it into New Jersey.

  That would surely be an improvement on George Washington's sailing a silver dollar across the Rappahannock. And yet some people insist that there is no such thing as progress.

  *

  I am sometimes called "The King of Candlesticks," because I own more than one thousand candlesticks.

  But I am fonder of my middle name, which is "Daffodil-11." And I have written this poem about it, and about life itself, of course:

  "I was those seeds,

  "I am this meat,

  "This meat hates pain,

  "This meat must eat.

  "This meat must sleep,

  "This meat must dream,

  "This meat must laugh,

  "This meat must scream.

  "But when, as meat,

  "It's had its fill,

  "Please plant it as

  "A Daffodil."

  And who will read all this? God knows. Not Melody and Isadore, surely. Like all the other young people on the island, they can neither read nor write.

  They have no curiosity about the human past, nor about what life may be like on the mainland.

  As far as they are concerned, the most glorious accomplishment of the people who inhabited this island so teemingly was to die, so we could have it all to ourselves.

  I asked them the other evening to name the three most important human beings in history. They protested that the question made no sense to them.

  I insisted that they put their heads together anyway, and give me some sort of answer, which they did. They were very sulky about the exercise. It was painful to them.

  They finally came up with an answer. Melody does most of the talking for them, and this is what she said in all seriousness: "You, and Jesus Christ, and Santa Claus."

  Hi ho.

  *

  When I do not ask them questions, they are as happy as clams.

  *

  They hope to become slaves of Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa some day. That is O.K. with me.

  2

  AND I REALLY WILL try to stop writing "Hi ho" all the time.

  Hi ho.

  *

  I was born right here in New York City. I was not then a Daffodil I was christened Wilbur Rockefeller-Swain.

  I was not alone, moreover. I had a dizygotic twin, a female. She was named Eliza Mellon Swain.

  We were christened in a hospital rather than in a church, and we were not surrounded by relatives and our parents' friends. The thing was: Eliza and I were so ugly that our parents were ashamed.

  We were monsters, and we were not expected to live very long. We had six fingers on each little hand, and six toes on each little footsie. We had supernumerary nipples as well--two of them apiece.

  We were not mongolian idiots, although we had the coarse black hair typical of mongoloids. We were something new. We were neanderthaloids. We had the features of adult, fossil human beings even in infancy--massive brow-ridges, sloping foreheads, and steamshovel jaws.

  *

  We were supposed to have no intelligence, and to die before we were fourteen.

  But I am still alive and kicking, thank you. And Eliza would be, too, I'm certain, if she had not been killed at the age of fifty--in an avalanche on the outskirts of the Chinese colony on the planet Mars.

  Hi ho.

  *

  Our parents were two silly and pretty and very young people named Caleb Mellon Swain and Letitia Vanderbilt Swain, nee Rockefeller. They were fabulously well-to-do, and descended from Americans who had all but wrecked the planet with a form of Idiot's Delight--obsessively turning money into power, and then power back into money again, and then money back into power again.

  But Caleb and Letitia were harmless themselves. Father was very good at backgammon and so-so at color photography, they say. Mother was active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Neither worked. Neither was a college graduate, though both had tried.

  They wrote and spoke nicely. They adored each other. They were humble about having done so poorly in schools. They were kind.

  And I cannot fault them for being shattered by having given birth to monsters. Anyone would have been shattered by giving birth to Eliza and me.

  *

  And Caleb and Letitia were at least as good at parenting as I was, when my turn rolled around. I was wholly indifferent to my own children, although they were normal in every way.

  Perhaps I would have been more entertained by my children if they had been monsters like Eliza and me.

  Hi ho.

  *

  Young Caleb and Letitia were advised not to break their hearts and risk their furniture by attempting to raise Eliza and me in Turtle Bay. We were no more true relatives of theirs, their advisors said, than baby crocodiles.

  Caleb's and Letitia's response was humane. It was also expensive and Gothic in the extreme. Our parents did not hide us in a private hospital for cases such as ours. They entombed us instead in a spooky old mansion which they had inherited--in the midst of two hundred acres of apple trees on a mountain-top, near the hamlet of Galen, Vermont.

  No one had lived there for thirty years.

  *

  Carpenters and electricians and plumbers were brought in to turn it into a sort of paradise for Eliza and me. Thick rubber padding was put under all the wall-to-wall carpets, so we would not hurt ourselves in case we fell. Our diningroom was lined with tile, and there were drains in the floor, so we and the room could be hosed off after every meal.

  More important, perhaps, were two chain-link fences which went up. They were topped with barbed wire. The first enclosed the orchard. The second separated the mansion from the prying eyes of the workmen who had to be let in through the first from time to time in order to look after the apple trees.

  Hi ho.

  *

  A staff was recruited from the neighborhood. There was a cook. There were two cleaning women and a cleaning man. There were two practical nurses who fed us and dressed us and undressed us and bathed us. The one I remember best is Withers Witherspoon, a combination guard, chauffeur and handyman.

  His mother was a Withers. His father was a Witherspoon.

  *

  Yes, and these were simple country people, who, with the exception of Withers Witherspoon, who had been a soldier, had never been outside Vermont. They had rarely ventured more than ten miles from Galen, for that matter--and they were necessarily all related to one another, as inbred as Eskimos.

  They were of course distantly related to Eliza and me, too, since our Vermont ancestors had once been content to dogpaddle endlessly, so to speak, in the same tiny genetic pool.

  But, in the American scheme of things at that time, they were related to our family as carp were related to eagles, say--for our family had evolved into world-travelers and multimillionaires.

  Hi ho.

  *

  Yes, and it was easy for our parents to buy the fealty of these living fossils from the family past. They were given modest salaries which seemed enormous to them, since the money-making lobes of their brains were so primitive.

  They were given pleasant apartments in the mansion, and color television sets. They were encouraged to eat like emperors, charging whatever they liked to our parents. They had very little work to do.

  Better still, they did not have to think much for themselves. They were placed under the command of a young general practitioner who lived in the hamlet, Dr. Stewart Rawlings Mott, who would look in on us every day.

  Dr. Mott was a Texan, incidentally, a melancholy and private young man. To this day, I do not kno
w what induced him to move so far from his people and his birthplace--to practice medicine in an Eskimo settlement in Vermont.

  As a curious footnote in history, and a probably meaningless one: The grandson of Dr. Mott would become the King of Michigan during my second term as President of the United States.

  I must hiccup again: Hi ho.

  *

  I swear: If I live to complete this autobiography, I will go through it again, and cross out all the "Hi ho's."

  Hi ho.

  *

  Yes, and there was an automatic sprinkler system in the mansion--and burglar alarms on the windows and doors and skylights.

  When we grew older and uglier, and capable of breaking arms or tearing heads off, a great gong was installed in the kitchen. This was connected to cherry red push-buttons in every room and at regular intervals down every corridor. The buttons glowed in the dark.

  A button was to be pushed only if Eliza or I began to toy with murder.

  Hi ho.

  3

  FATHER TO GALEN with a lawyer and a physician and an architect--to oversee the refurbishing of the mansion for Eliza and me, and the hiring of the servants and Dr. Mott. Mother remained here in Manhattan, in their townhouse in Turtle Bay.

  Turtles in great profusion, incidentally, have returned to Turtle Bay.

  Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa's slaves like to catch them for soup.

  Hi ho.

  *

  It was one of the few occasions, except for Father's death, when Mother and Father were separated for more than a day or two. And Father wrote a graceful letter to Mother from Vermont, which I found in Mother's bedside table after Mother died.

  It may have been the whole of their correspondence by mail.

  "My dearest Tish--" he wrote, "Our children will be very happy here. We can be proud. Our architect can be proud. The workmen can be proud.

  "However short our children's lives may be, we will have given them the gifts of dignity and happiness. We have created a delightful asteroid for them, a little world with only one mansion on it, and otherwise covered with apple trees."

  *

  Then he returned to an asteroid of his own--in Turtle Bay. He and Mother, thereafter, again on the advice of physicians, would visit us once a year, and always on our birthday.

  Their brownstone still stands, and it is still snug and weathertight. It is there that our nearest neighbor, Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa, now quarters her slaves.