Mr. Eternity Read Free Page B

all, or saw him only at official occasions. We lived extravagantly in our hereditary palace, which had once been the city library of imperial St. Louis. We had an oven big enough to bake fifty cassava rounds at one time. We had baths as big as a farmer’s whole house. We had a hundred peacocks, acrylic clothing, real carpets, paraffin lanterns, plastic bins and jugs, and exotic commodities like cashew wine, which we obtained from neighboring countries on an economyof exchange. We had water tanks and strategic grain reserves, and the whole edifice was encapsulated from the poor people within an enormous concrete wall.
    For me, however, life was corrupted by frustrations, because I was a woman in a place and time where men hoarded up all the power. I could never participate in the larger sphere of activity. My father used me like a bartering chip. He affianced me to a sequence of men, the last of whom was the piggish senator Anthony Fucking Corvette, whom I had to visit each week to solidify family alliances. We would sit together at an antique plastic table and he would say things like, “It is better to drink muddy water and eat dirt.” Better than what? Then I had to let him do it to me. He did it by rote and political requirement and then he bollocked off to his hookers and his poppy juice and I went home to lie in my hammock and dream of another life. This is what it was to be a president’s daughter in the final years of the twenty-fifth century. It was an endless liturgy of palace tedium and an injustice of diminished freedoms. I called myself an anachro-feminist, a term of my own proud coinage, but it was only a phrase. I had no recourse.
    My father did not care a sesame seed for my troubles, but we did share one fascination in common, which was the transformations and legacies of history. We had only a limited selection of books in the palace, but we knew which side the world was buttered on. We knew that we were opulent people in an impoverished time. We knew that our country was just a subsistence nation of millet and goats and camels. The ruins of great days fringed and ringed the city in a huge periphery and we knew that our own St. Louis was only a tiny particle of the St. Louis that had existed in ancient bygone imperial days. The difference was that while I sat in the library striving to learn all I could about the true and established facts of the world, my father hardly read anything anymore, and instead he preoccupied himself with thoughts of his own place in history. His great ambition was to unite all the nations of North America under one flag, as they’d been united in freedom and democracy under the empire of the United States. He also wanted to revitalize culture andlearning. I often heard him say things like, “It is time we remodernized this ragbag old country.”
    He had mandated that we speak only Modern English at home, the language of American scholars, and I wasn’t allowed to speak Mississippi Spanish at all until I was ten years old, but other than this he did nothing, for he didn’t know how to commence the effort of remodernization. Maybe, in an alternative reality, he would never have been catalyzed into action at all, but it happened that one night, when I myself was already twenty-six and my father had long since begun to feel the pinch of years, he bought an old slave named Daniel Defoe from some people who came in off the desert. It was a night of shining rain and cicadas, which I know because I chanced to be there. I was just returning from dinner and fornications with Anthony Fucking Corvette, and my father was out by the front gate, and when he saw me he said, “Oh, it’s you,” as if he had just recollected my existence. “Then come along and I’ll show you something.”
    We issued into the camel pen and there was Daniel Defoe. It was the first time I cast eyes on him. He had a superannuated cat named Christopher Smart, who was like a gray carpet with teeth, and he was