Mr. Eternity by Aaron Thier Page A

believed that thunder was a magical wind unchained by a person who had communion with demons, and that any grain lost during a thunderstorm became the property of men in flying cars who came from a country called Manoa. They believed that an illness begun in the fourth quarter of the moon would always have a fatal termination.
    My father wouldn’t tolerate this hokey-pokey in his own household. “We are secular Americans,” he said. One of the only times I ever heard him shout in anger was when he heard Domingos, one of our house slaves, asking Jesus to make the cook give him cornmeal for breakfast, like a rich person. My father said that Jesus was nothing but a magician who was buried in a cabbage patch and that talking to Jesus flew in the face of his whole ideological agenda. But none of us could swear that there was no place called Manoa, and even though I told the slave girls that they should not give up hope if they became sick during the last quarter of the moon, it was true that people died more often at this time.
    My father started an information and propaganda campaign to extirpate superstition and remodernize the spirit of St. Louis, but his larger strategy was to introduce economic reforms that would extirpate poverty, since poverty stultified the wits and was ultimately the cause of ignorance.His first large initiative was a factory that made cloth from camel hair. Daniel Defoe had explained that in other arid countries, camel cloth was a principal item of manufacture, and my father wanted to produce huge quantities and sell it across the river in the places that camels abhorred. He was like a lunatic in his excitement over this idea. He now revised Daniel Defoe’s title, which became Vice-Secretary of Camel Cloth Manufacture and Remodernization Policy.
    It’s true that the cotton crop often failed because of droughts, so initially I thought camel cloth was a clever alternative. Camels were the animal equivalence of poppies and mama beans. They thrived in droughts. They could drink sunlight and breathe sand. They could also see through their eyelids. All day they absorbed heat and in the night they cooled, emanating warmth like coals. They were also very familiar to everyone in St. Louis, so it was reasonable to think the cloth-makers would be comfortable working with them. Everyone drank camel milk, and whenever poor people were celebrating they also ate camel meat. They called it shamo, after the French chameau, a convention which delighted my father because it dated from the time of the United States.
    “But the problem is labor,” said Edward Halloween. “He says that camel cloth will create jobs, but who is the only person who has no job? It is you, my feminist friend.”
    “It’s true. The poor people have so many jobs they can hardly do anything. Instead of jobs, it will create chaos.”
    “Ah, but that reminds me. I’ve thought of a new theory. Ask me about it.”
    “Ask you about what?”
    “My theory!”
    “Oh yes, of course. Tell me, Doctor Halloween, what is your new theory?”
    “My theory is about chaos and craziness,” he said. He lifted his chin and gripped his hands behind his back, like a child reciting a poem. “Both are types of disorder, but craziness is an affliction of the mind and chaos is an affliction of the world. You might say, ‘Hello, I am a human.It is my job to impose order on chaos.’ But this is not true. Chaos is born in men and women and it is our fate to disseminate it in an orderly world. That is the purpose of a human. Chaos is the outcome and craziness is the force or the process. Those of us who are craziest are those through whom chaos shines like a torch.”
    This speech had a firm allegorical rigor that appealed to me very much. It was his way of saying that the great remodernization campaign of President Roulette could be figured as a process of disseminating chaos, which did in fact turn out to be true.

    At this time I didn’t know Daniel Defoe