Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [48]
The King himself sat at the map table, ostentatiously reading a book, which turned out to be Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.
Behind him, standing, were three male scribes—with pencils and pads.
There was no place for me or anyone else to sit.
I positioned myself before him, my mouldy Homburg in hand. He did not look up from his book immediately, although the doorkeeper had certainly announced me loudly enough.
“Your Majesty,” the doorkeeper had said, “Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, the President of the United States!!”
• • •
He looked up at last, and I was amused to see that he was the spit and image of his grandfather, Dr. Stewart Rawlings Mott, the physician who had looked after my sister and me in Vermont so long ago.
• • •
I was not in the least afraid of him. Tri-benzo-Deportamil was making me soigné and blasé, of course. But, also, I had had more than enough of the low comedy of living by then. I would have found it a rather shapely adventure, if the King had elected to hustle me in front of a firing squad.
“We thought you were dead,” he said.
“No, your Majesty,” I said.
“It’s been so long since we heard anything about you,” he said.
“Washington, D.C., runs out of ideas from time to time,” I said.
• • •
The scribes were taking all this down, all this history that was being made.
He held up the spine of the book so I could read it. “Thucydides,” he said.
“Um,” I said.
“History is all I read,” he said.
“That is wise for a man in your position, your Majesty,” I replied.
“Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it,” he said.
The scribes scribbled away.
“Yes,” I said. “If our descendents don’t study our times closely, they will find that they have again exhausted the planet’s fossil fuels, that they have again died by the millions of influenza and The Green Death, that the sky has again been turned yellow by the propellants for underarm deodorants, that they have again elected a senile President two meters tall, and that they are yet again the intellectual and spiritual inferiors of teeny-weeny Chinese.”
He did not join my laughter.
I addressed his scribes directly, speaking over his head. “History is merely a list of surprises,” I said. “It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again. Please write that down.”
49
IT TURNED OUT that the young King had an historic document he wished me to sign. It was brief. In it, I acknowledged that I, the President of the United States of America, no longer exercised any control over that part of the North American Continent which was sold by Napoleon Bonaparte to my country in 1803, and which was known as “The Louisiana Purchase.”
I, therefore, according to the document, sold it for a dollar, to Stewart Oriole-2 Mott, the King of Michigan.
I signed with the teeny-weeniest signature possible. It looked like a baby ant. “Enjoy it in good health!” I said.
The territory I had sold him was largely occupied by the Duke of Oklahoma, and, no doubt, by other potentates and panjandrums unknown to me.
After that, we chatted some about his grandfather.
Then Captain O’Hare and I took off for Urbana, Illinois, and an electronic reunion with my sister, who had been dead so long.
Hi ho.
• • •
Yes, and I write now with a palsied hand and an aching head, for I drank much too much at my birthday party last night.
Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa arrived encrusted with diamonds, borne through the ailanthus forest in a sedan chair, accompanied by an entourage of fourteen slaves. She brought me wine and beer, which made me drunk. But her most intoxicating gifts were a thousand candles she and her slaves had made in a colonial candle mold. We fitted them into the empty mouths of my thousand candlesticks, and deployed them over the lobby floor.
Then we lit them all.
Standing among all those tiny, wavering lights, I felt as though I were God, up to my knees in the Milky Way.