• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

• • •

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 passion, 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.

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 button 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, wishing 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 skyscrapers 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