Mr. Eternity by Aaron Thier

To the north was devastated land and then, much farther north, a bevy of small rich countries, in particular Minnesota, our former colonial overlord, against which my Roulette ancestors had fought a liberation war. To the south was hot trackless wilderness and to the west was the American desert, where there were mummified ghost towns and a few scattered roving ensembles of people. I often mused upon the desert and fancied that I had a large envy for the freedoms of that wild life. These people were few in number and they lived without formalized national coalitions. They slept in tents and gathered wild dates and sucked milk from their camels. They worshipped Jesus in the eternal blue sky and they hated us because we ate grain.
    “We should just run away to the sweeping sand hills of Nebraska,” I said. “We should just tell all these palace people they can kiss our south ends.”
    “Ah,” said Edward Halloween, “but the desert people are said to drive their women before them like camels. For anachro-feminists like us, the desert is no more congenial than the city.”
    Edward Halloween was actually a eunuch, so anachro-feminism had a different resonance for him. He was allowed to live however he preferred. Sometimes he lived as a man and wore denim and a red bandanna, like the presidential guard, and sometimes he lived as a woman and wore tight leather shorts and a strip of black cloth around his chest. But he was also barred from conventional employments, which is why he was forced to be a clown. His true vocation was that he was a poet and a genius. As an impoverished youth, he had magically and spontaneously learned to read, and later he composed an alphabetic novel, although he never wrote it down. He would recite passages when he drank too much sweet potato wine, which frequently occurred because he was addicted to sweet potato wine, as most poets were. I suspected it was a tour de force of searing intensity, but it was impossible to understand.
    “Sometimes I think I am more of an anarchic feminist,” I said. “Especially when Anthony Fucking Corvette is grunting on top of me. Sometimes I think I want to see the whole façade of state come crashing down.”
    He gazed at me with affection and sympathy, or at the least I thought he did. It was hard to determine because he’d painted his face white and he had a purple hat pulled down to his eyebrows.
    “Your father is just the hand puppet of history,” he said. “It isn’t useful to hate him because he’s hardly a human being in his own right. He is the despotism of centuries. He’s a system of patronage. He’s a scepter and a crown.”
    “But what does that make me? Anyway, I don’t hate him. I don’t know what I feel for him. All I really want is a chance to fizz. But every time I achieve a good mood, I have to take my dress off for Anthony Fucking Corvette.”
    “And I have to keep clowning,” he said, “even though I despise clowning.”
    “It would be better to have no thoughts. That way, humiliations are just humiliations and they lack theoretical underpinning.”
    “Thoughts are what save us, my friend. We are the only people in these dominions with a remodernized outlook and philosophy.”
    A slave came around with silver thimbles of poppy juice and I snuffed a little into my nostrils. The ballroom was very loud. I said, “What would I do without you, Mr. Halloween?”
    “You’d turn stamping crazy and burn this palace to its foundation, which would probably be better for everyone.”

    The biggest obstacle to remodernization was that the people of the Reunited States were extremely superstitious. They weren’t likely to embrace new, anachronistic technologies and ideas. When there was a lunar eclipse, for example, they stood in the streets shouting encouragement and throwing stones and setting big fires so that the moon would not be swallowed up by the darkness. When someone died, they filled the dead person’s mouth with sand. They