The Pox Party Read online

  The embossed names on the volumes glowed faintly in the candlelight, the mother, the son, twinned in each passing month, and I thought of those months — playing at her knees; or her telling me tales of the Governor’s wife and lap-dog, the barking, the stains, the hullabaloo of servants; I considered the nights of my childhood when she sat by my side and stared down upon me; and I recalled that earliest image, standing with her while men burned bubbles in the orchard like the ignition of cherubim. Such scenes as these, I had no doubt, were not extant in the volumes there, slipped between the quantification of my appetites; thus, I might read of the weight of peach cobbler I had eaten on a certain night when I was five, but not recall the blush of evening as I walked with her a half an hour later among the garden herbs.

  I did not speak; instead, I meditated on the passage of time, and how it may be found in both a dry and a wet or gaseous state; how, though lush, it might be desiccated for storage.

  “So you understand the experiment, then,” said 03-01.

  I grasped the edges of my stool. 03-01 had crossed his legs.

  “That is not all, sir,” I said.

  “No,” said 03-01. “That . . . is not all.”

  “Would you tell me, sir?”

  “You know, Octavian.”

  I shook my head.

  Mr. 03-01 frowned. “What did you revolve in your thoughts, during the long silence?”

  “I was thinking of time, sir.”

  “I do not follow.”

  “How time has different states, like unto the elements.”

  “This is novel,” said 03-01.

  “And how it is become dried.”

  “You are a clever boy, though somewhat too obscure.”

  “Sir, you have not answered my question.”

  “Regarding?”

  “Your work, sir,” I said, “with me.”

  “True, I have not. You know what I shall say.”

  “Still, I am . . .” I spake no more.

  He asked, “What would you know?”

  “Why are we called by names, when all others have numbers?”

  “For the reason that you are the experiment, and all the rest of this . . . the house, the guests, the servants . . . all are in service of that pursuit of truth. You are central to the work; we, but the disembodied observers of your progress.”

  “What do you propose to do with me?”

  “You know the answer.”

  “Tell me, please, sir,” I said.

  He gave me a canny look, and explained slowly, “We are providing you with an education equal to any of the princes of Europe . . . We wish to divine whether you are a separate and distinct species. Thus, we wish to determine your capacity, as an African prince, for the acquisition of the noble arts and sciences.”

  “You wish to prove that I am the equal of any other?”

  “We wish to prove nothing,” said 03-01. “We simply aim at discovering the truth.” He rose from his stool.

  “Sir —”

  “Stand,” he said; which I did. “Put out your arms at your sides, straight,” said he; which I did.

  “Sir —,” I said, “you shall be glad of my success?”

  He smiled. “Of course I shall,” he said. “You are a good boy.”

  I asked, “Shall I someday be called by a number?”

  He looked fondly upon me. He said, “That, Octavian, is something to aspire to.” He turned away from me, and began perusing the volumes upon the shelf, selecting some, drawing them out, and laying them in the crook of his arm.

  I waited, my arms outstretched at either side, until he turned again, and began to stack them, volume after volume, on my hands.

  “When I was a boy,” said he, “this was my punishment. Standing with Milton weighing upon one hand and Shakespeare the other. But you . . . you shall be encumbered with your own past, hm?”

  My hands bobbed beneath the weight.

  “Drop one,” he said, “and you shall be caned.” He stepped out into the experimental chamber and shouted for Bono.

  Turning back to me, he said, “Here, my boy, was the miraculous aspect of this little torture, as I found. When twenty minutes had passed, and I was permitted to set down the volumes, or they were taken from my hands — when I was relieved of the weight of the books — I marked that as I dropped my empty arms, they rose again of their own accord. . . . They drifted upwards. They felt as light as air. I could not keep them down. ’Twas an ecstatic sensation. . . . My arms yearned for the stance of punishment; and when they lifted thus, I could have been flying. This, you must understand, Octavian, is the true and sublime end of discipline: that you may rise into a new and glorious buoyancy.”

  And so the answer to my perplexities, which must appear in all its clarity to those who look from above, was finally clear to me: that I too was the subject of a zoological experiment.

  I took new interest in the torpedo-fish with their crackling shocks; in the turtles that paced beside yardsticks; in the mice sliced end to end, that their gestation might be viewed.

  They were my brethren.

  As I parsed Latin sentences, I noted 03-01’s interest in my progress. I knew that behind the forbidden door, he kept his records of what I did. There would be, someday, an article about me in the Philosophical Ephemera of the Novanglian College of Lucidity. My life, now, tended toward that moment.

  Revolving my thoughts upon this curious state, I resolved thus: I would not fail 03-01. I would not fail my mother. I would prove the superior excellence of my faculties.

  From that day, my studies took on a new intensity.

  And I played the violin like a very devil.

  [A letter from Dr. Matthias Fruhling, of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, to his wife]

  Boston

  March 10th, 1768

  My dear Joan —

  The packet-boat from New-York hath deposited me at long last upon Boston wharves; and now, being arrived at Mr. Gitney’s establishment, I am like to remain for some weeks before I take my passage to Calais.

  Heartily do I wish thou couldst see this household — its freaks and pranks and glories. The knowledge enshrined here is most luminous; but the extravagance is wearying, an outrage to God and man, especially when set amidst so pious a town, where the most finical youth buys his fopperies in brown and gray; and where, when a man whistles upon the street, it is a tune from Ainsworth’s psalter.

  Notwithstanding the noxious luxury of the College, I spent a most gratifying day in converse with the philosophers of this place before we set forth on a bold experiment: Inviting a gentleman to stand atop a platform of rosin, we electrified him, observing how pieces of gold-leaf he held upon a copper tray flew up to the fingertips of a man not yet imbricated by charge. Following this gratifying assay, we being shod in clogs of wax, a battery discharged shocks through wands we held and motivated metal filings, as we sought to determine whether the particles of electro-ætherial flux were, in shape, triangular or lozenge.

  In the evening, Mr. Gitney — who insists that we enumerate him 03-01 — held some fashion of levee for the Boston nobility, which hath lasted us near till dawn with music and a coati-mundi and another display of electrical virtue which tickled my palms and burnt my eyelashes to a frizzle. Chief among the pleasures was a most ravishing Negress, a Princess of Africa, who presided over the evening with a curious baton, like a Queen of the Djinns. Sigh not for jealousy, Mrs. Fruhling — she cast no eye upon me, and I made no overtures to that imperious individual, being of far too plain and low a stature for Her Highness.

  Late in the evening, they arranged for her son, a solemn little article of eight or ten years old, to play the violin with his music-master and others in consort. He is a beanpole of a boy. Thou hast not heard fiddling, Joan, until thou hast heard this tiny being, legs thin as sumac twigs, produce such tones; which sweet music dazzled not merely in its display of speed and accuracy, but most in its gravity; the child being able to introduce an
element of melancholy into even the liveliest of passages.

  Of the glittering and outrageous train of that house, he was the least conspicuous; being dressed in dark, rich satins, and perpetually silent; and yet, among them all, amidst the revelry and the obscene antics of the poets and the coati-mundi, it was he who was the wonder; I would liefer speak to this boy for fifteen minutes than to some of their prating, babbling, atheistical horde for five hours together. I found an opportunity to exchange some words with him, the others rushing out into the yard, waxen clogs a-thumping, to place bets upon a battle royal between a mongoose and an asp.

  I wish thou couldst have spoken to the child, as thou hadst drawn him out and set him at his ease; to me, he was civil, but so overwhelmed in humility he could barely converse. Howsoever humble he might be, a curious thing: When I looked upon him and spake with him, he would not meet my eyes with his; he stared fixedly at some point, and made his addresses as if to the air; but when no one looked upon him, he gazed upon us all with almost a hungriness in his assessment; as if memorizing the details of our dress and carriage and conversation; and chipping it unsmiling upon tablets so it might later be used to damn us at the end of Time, or at least explain us to some other Intelligence come after us.

  I could not but think of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, shortly to be consigned to the blast-furnaces of Nebuchadnezzar — captive “children in whom was no blemish, but well favored, and skillful in all wisdom, and cunning in knowledge, and understanding science, and such as had ability to stand in the King’s palace, and whom they might teach the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans.”

  Well might thou wonder how this vain household may continue in its expense and luxurious operations. I gained some little view of its financial arrangements when, late in the evening, Mr. Gitney asked me to consider a proposition; that he and his fellow Gitneys are joining with a consortium of Virginian gentlemen to purchase vast quantities of land from the Indians; which property they shall, once they own it, split up into smaller parcels and sell at profit to men of the middling sort wishing to head West.

  I protested that making such purchases with the Indians, Parliament has disallowed in the strongest of terms; that we have been rebuked for annoying the Savages with our invasions and broken treaties; and to recall the heathen Pontiac, his terrible revenge; that we have late fought a war with the Savages over just such encroachments; and that the unfortunates who purchased said lots were likely, within two years, to succumb to massacre and retribution.

  He rallied me upon my cowardice, and said that Parliament should never enforce their strictures against settling upon Indian territory; that property was property, and he was purchasing the land openly and without prejudice; that Americans should not be thwarted by the laws of ancient aristocracies, corrupt dukes, self-styled marquises and thanes; and that a friend in Philadelphia should be a great boon to the project, there being some animosity between Pennsylvania and Virginia in this matter.

  Well canst thou imagine that I could not hazard our little portion on such a dangerous business, which venture can end only in financial ruin and the destruction of Christians by heathen tomahawk and the tricks of barbarous Deviltry. I should not be sorry, did the Lord sweep the savages further to the west; but I doubt His divine will shall ever be expressed through Virginians. They are not his especial people. Thus, Mrs. Fruhling, I joined no consortium, being content merely to observe the experiments here and engage in dispute about the nature of air.

  I must retire from the scritoire; the frolic is over. It is now almost breakfast-time, the mongoose is being buried with full Catholic rites, and it appears Mrs. Ogilvy hath broken her jaw. She was, I fear, unaccustomed to waxen clogs.

  I shall find a house of prayer as very soon as I can quit this place, so that I may remain

  Thy devout and loving husband,

  Matthias F.

  Latin and Greek were taught me by Dr. Trefusis, 09-01, the aged philosophe. In his youth, he had been welcomed at the courts of Versailles and Sansouci. His knowledge was prodigious; his mastery of philosophic depths was total, though his notions were somewhat eccentric. He worked with me word by word, leaning over my shoulder as I parsed my way through Tacitus and Homer; which instruction must have seemed to him not unlike the sea-captain, who having braved the catastrophic blasts and giddy precipices of the mælstrom, and but skated to their side; having passed with expert haste through the clashing Simplegades; having sat in the sick green eye of the hurricane, surrounded by the hulking wrecks of other, less fortunate, fleets; now wades with a little nephew in the warm shallows, collecting trash and pretty bits of shell. He must have looked out to sea with his glass sometimes, and wished for the spray, and men with whom he could truly speak of the rigors of navigation.

  With him did I read of the fall of empires and the rise of the gods from the darkness of eternal night. With him, I read Cicero’s defense of murderers, and Suetonius’s history of murderous kings; Plautus’s comedies; Seneca’s tragedies; Ovid on the art of love and Aristotle on the love of art.

  I saw that emperors may have their day, but then, surrounded even by pomp and luxury, they may fall, and their cities be in ruin.

  Dr. 09-01 had a kind, but gloomy, disposition. He only rarely cut my palms with his ferule for mistakes. He would, of an afternoon, smuggle up gingerbread from the kitchen, and would speak at length of Rome and Greece in their glory with his mouth full and spraying. He was exceeding lanky, and coiled himself in corners of the room, balled up silently and watching while I stuttered my construes.

  Perhaps his gloom was due to his profession, that he lived among fallen empires, and in reading these languages that had not been spoken by the common man in centuries, he had all about him the ruins of language, evidence of toppled suburbs, grass growing among the mosaics, and voices that had been choked with poison, iron, age, or ash.

  He was possessed of a belief that nothing existed, or to be more precise, that only when things were perceived could we be sure that they existed. He troubled himself in arguments, therefore, that when he was not in his chamber, and no one else was in his chamber, there was no one who could say beyond a shadow of a doubt that his desk still existed, no one to say that the candle still guttered by the bed; or that the bed had not simply frayed apart into atoms.

  To combat this situation, he requested that one of the slaves periodically creep to his door when he was absent, and hurl it quickly open, to determine whether the desk remained, or whether, with no one to perceive it, it had simply given up and dissipated. When 03-01 protested that this was hardly worth the vigilance of busy servants, Dr. 09-01 took the task upon himself, and developed the habit of leaving company quite suddenly and charging above-stairs to his chamber, throwing the door open, and crying, “Ah ha!” He found, always, that matter had retained its dubious solidity in his absence; but this did not deter him.

  Gradually, he developed the startling habit of entering rooms with a leap.

  He maintained that we were surrounded by a vast shadow, a universal emptiness as wide and long as space, in which there were small molten bulbs of color and light, wheresoever there were beings to perceive them. He believed that as we walked, the world of objects unfurled before us like the painted scene for a play, turrets, and moats, and topiary aisles slapping down into place just before we would arrive.

  Once, late at night, he roused me and took me to an empty room. I was somewhat afraid. The silence of the house was enormous.

  He stood me with my back to the wall, one inch from the paneling. He stood next to me. We faced the same way.

  “Sir,” said I, “for what have you —,” but he hissed, and I fell silent.

  For a long while, we stared straight forwards, side by side, in the empty room. It was a summer night, and the dogs of the town barked for a time, and then ceased. Still, we stood. Some ten minutes passed; then fifteen.

  “Do you feel it, child?” he asked. “The wall is gone. Space is gone from beh
ind us.”

  I could feel nothing.

  He said, “All that is there now is the eye of God.” He shivered. “The pupil is black, and as large as a world.”

  Dr. 09-01, among the academicians, stands above the rest in my recollection for his affection shown to myself and to my mother; also, in that regard, I remember fondly my music-master, 13-04.

  The music-master was a young man, thin and clean, whose bright silk waistcoats belied the gravity of the rest of his vesture, which was black and brown. Now, upon reflection, I suspect that he did not have moneys sufficient to dress as he wished, and so settled for being but half-dandified. The effect was somewhat awkward — but I can say this only because my habiliments were paid for, and I was often dressed in silks; my frock-coats, as well as my waistcoats, tended to the florid before I had any choice in the matter. 03-01 chose such colors as he said offset the duskiness of my skin and tended towards picturesque effect.

  13-04 had studied in Italy himself with the great masters. He taught my mother the art of playing the harpsichord, and, when I was four or five, began to tutor me on the violin. Together, we played not only the music of the moment, but music of the past, which I grew to love, though it was unfashionable. We played the sonatas of Mr. Handel and Dr. Boyce, of Locatelli, Tartini, and Gluck. My especial favorites were those autumnal sonatas of Signor Corelli, which had made such a stir in the century previous. We played them in the evenings as the sun set over the steeples of Boston, casting broad, brazen rectangles of light across the fraying rugs. We spun out the somber passages, our violins singing one to the other as my mother played upon the harpsichord, and perhaps this is as much of her sadness and joy as I shall know.