Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (44 page)

1957

H. F. ELLIS

THE LAST REPOSITORY

O
F
the mental exercises, or fantasies, I indulge in to keep myself awake when I cannot sleep, perhaps the most useless runs as follows: I am the last adult left on earth, in charge of a huddle of children who will be the fathers and mothers of all future mankind. We are in some sort of safe place and have no immediate problems about survival or keeping out the rain. I don’t know how we got there and I don’t care, any more than I concern myself with the details of our daily life. I am too old now to picture myself as the kind of man who could carve fishhooks out of bones in an emergency. All that side of life is somehow provided for; nor am I answerable to anyone for a full explanation. If I were cooking up an imaginative novel, it would be different; fiction is sacred, fantasy is free. So, also, I am not compelled to account to myself for the fact that all knowledge has disappeared along with my contemporaries. All books, all instruments and apparatus, all drugs, vehicles, weapons, factories, pots, pans, and other relics of civilization have been destroyed or buried irretrievably under a thick layer of radioactive dust. I am the sole repository of the accumulated wisdom and experience of man, from pre-Sumerian times to the holocaust.

I feel the responsibility acutely, and often have to turn my pillow over to keep a cool head when I reflect that whatever I fail to pass on to my little band of orphans tumbling about so happily in the sun will be lost forever—or at best will have to be rediscovered by the slow and painful process of trial and error. It seems to me a terrible thing that the human race should have to wait another seven thousand years before safety matches are available again. I cannot bear to contemplate the repetition of the myriad ingenious fallacies and misapprehensions that have bedevilled the course of human history. It was some five thousand years after the dawn of civilization (which I take leave to date around the sixth millennium) before Empedocles produced the notion that earth, air, fire, and water were the four elements of which everything was composed, and got considerable credit for this error. More than two thousand years later, imponderables like phlogiston, caloric, and ether were still supposed to be at large in the universe, accounting for things. We do not want to plow our way through all that stuff again. And only I, tossing and turning in my lonely bed, can prevent it.

I must try to put my toddlers on the right lines about protons and neutrons, which is bound to involve some preliminary talk about electricity. And this again reminds me that I may not be spared long enough for their tiny minds to be ready for instruction about even so elementary a matter as winding wire around a magnetized iron core. I may be suffering from a touch of strontium 90, which could be a serious thing at my age. In case anything irremediable happens to me in the meantime, I ought to write these things down. I have paper and pencils in this fantasy, for I really cannot be bothered to improvise clay tablets at half past one in the morning. But what shall I write? Where shall I begin my task? The phrase “something irremediable” that came into my head just now is a pleasant Grecism for death and reminds me that the achievement of ancient Athens will be lost forever unless I put it down on paper. It is a question of time and evaluation. I find it extraordinarily difficult to decide whether Sophocles or safety matches should come first.

“Safety matches are a simple means of producing fire and are made by dipping thin pieces of wood into a brown mixture containing phosphorus,” I see myself jotting down for posterity. “When the brown end is rubbed against some more of this brown stuff, a flame results and the piece of wood burns. Phosphorus is found in bones, if I remember rightly, and you will just have to keep on trying until you learn how to extract it.”

This, to my surprise, is the best note I can write about the manufacture of matches without getting out of bed and consulting an encyclopedia. I should be sounder on Sophocles, I think, but it is hard to believe that a people still at the stage of rubbing sticks together would have time for Greek tragedy. I am constantly up against this problem of priorities. I desperately want, for instance, to give them a glimmering about airplanes, not caring to think about lives uselessly thrown away two thousand years hence in experiments with canvas frameworks attached to the arms. But it would be a long business, and at the end of it I doubt whether a machine made to my instructions would be stable in a high wind. How is it to be powered? I daresay I could set down the principle of the internal combustion engine in terms that would save time for these youngsters, once they had found out how to make steel, and I could add a footnote about jet propulsion for later on. It is the thought of the fuel that depresses me. When the whole human race is numbered in tens, or even in thousands, how does one present to them in an attractive light, as a worthwhile operation, the process of drilling tremendously deep holes in the earth on the off chance of finding a substance that is useless until you have cracked it?

I am up against much the same difficulty over drip-dry shirts. The truth seems to be that you have to have a population running into millions before anyone will take the trouble to make machines capable of producing millions of shirts. This is the kind of hard economic fact one comes up against around 3
A.M.,
when it begins to look as if the first essential step to be taken by my little group of survivors on the road back to civilization is to multiply as rapidly as possible. I do not feel, however, that I need give them any guidance about that.

SOMETIMES, at about this point in my fantasy, I half decide to concentrate on culture, eked out with a few simple conveniences made of wood. Aristotle’s definition of tragedy; whatever of Shakespeare I have by heart; the principle of the lever; the golden section, if I can be sure of it; a rough sketch of a wheelbarrow—that would not be a contemptible contribution to the future of the race. I could add an appendix stating a few scientific facts (the sun is ninety-three million miles away; water boils at two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit) for them to make what they liked of. But I can’t be satisfied with it. There is a sense of waste, of irreparable loss. Before long I am stuck again with the old desire to give them
all
I know, convinced anew that I must take the long-term view, that in the long run the merest hint—a shadowy clue about the possibility of refrigeration, pneumatic tires, anesthetics, the telephone, dried milk—is better than the endless silence of the tomb. Am I to lie here like a hog, sheltering behind the lateness of the hour, and deprive millions yet unborn of the knowledge that trees cut up fine, boiled into a mash, and rolled out thin can be written on with ink?

I am now face to face with the appalling truth that I have no idea how ink is made. Is it conceivable that it is still harvested from deliberately frightened cuttlefish on extensive squid farms? If so, I shall never touch it again.

The danger of setting down information for a too distant posterity is that it may be disregarded in the meantime—even lost—or its purpose may be misconceived. I foresee, as the cocks begin to crow, the possibility that my notebooks, with their fragments of Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” their squiggled representations of sewing machines and teapots, the brave attempt at the binomial theorem, will within a few generations assume the status of legend, become the corpus of a world mythology. My notebooks may, though I rather hope not, found a new religion. My description of the random behavior of molecules in an expanded gas may be read out on feast days by some uncomprehending priest while the multitude prostrates itself in awe and terror.

This is a risk that I am prepared to take. Justice will in the end be done. Some Schliemann of the future, filled with burning faith, will unearth with his primitive spade the proof that my writings are as true as Homer’s. “I have gazed,” he will report in a dramatic smoke signal, “upon the veritable egg whisk of the Notebooks.” This will cause a proper stir. The knowledge that the Notebooks are not Myth but Manual is bound to change the course of history. The tribe or clan that owns them, with the secret of the spoked wheel safe in its grasp, must inevitably predominate. My book will become the Book of Power—closely guarded, eagerly sought, probably fought for. The thought that my patient labor may well become the cause of World War IV sometimes, though not invariably, sends me to sleep.

1962

THOMAS MEEHAN

YMA DREAM

I
N
this dream, which I have had on the night of the full moon for the past three months, I am giving a cocktail party in honor of Yma Sumac, the Peruvian singer. This is strange at once, for while I have unbounded admiration for four-octave voices, I have never met Miss Sumac, and, even in a dream, it seems unlikely that I should be giving her a party. No matter. She and I are in the small living room of my apartment, on Charles Street, in Greenwich Village, and we are getting along famously. I have told her several of my Swedish-dialect stories, and she has reciprocated by singing for me, in Quechua, a medley of Andean folk songs. Other guests are expected momentarily. I have no idea, however, who any of them will be. Miss Sumac is wearing a blue ball gown and I am in white tie and tails. Obviously, despite the somewhat unfashionable neighborhood and the cramped quarters of my apartment, it is to be a pretty swell affair. In any case, I have spread several dishes of Fritos about the room, and on what is normally my typing table there is a bowl of hot
glügg.

The doorbell rings. A guest! I go to the door, and there, to my astonished delight, is Ava Gardner. This is going to be a bit of all right, I think.

“Tom, darling!” she says, embracing me warmly. “How wonderful of you to have asked me.”

In my waking hours, unfortunately, I have never met Miss Gardner. In my dream, though, my guests seem to know me rather intimately, while, oddly, none of them seem to know each other. Apparently it is their strong common affection for me that has brought them to Charles Street. For my part, although I immediately recognize each guest as he or she arrives, I have no memory of having ever met any of them, or, for that matter, of having invited them to a party in my apartment. On with the dream, however. “Miss Ava Gardner,” I say, “I’d like you to meet Miss Yma Sumac.”

“Charmed,” says Miss Sumac.

“Delighted,” counters Miss Gardner.

“Ah, but Tom,” says Miss Sumac, with an enchanting laugh (which runs up the scale from E above middle C to C above high C), “let us not, on this of all occasions, be formal.
Por favor,
introduce each guest only by the first name, so that we may all quickly become—how shall I say?
—amigos.
”

Typical Peruvian friendliness, I think, and reintroduce the two. “Ava, Yma,” I say.

We sit around for some time, sipping
glügg
and munching Fritos. Things seem to be going well. The doorbell rings again. The second guest is a man—Abba Eban, the former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations. Again I make the introductions, and, bowing to the wishes of the guest of honor, keep things on a first-name basis. “Abba, Yma; Abba, Ava,” I say.

I stifle a grin, but neither Miss Sumac nor my two other guests see anything amusing in the exchange. We chat. The bell rings again, and I am pleased to find Oona O’Neill, Charlie Chaplin’s wife, at the door. She is alone. I bring her into the room. “Oona, Yma; Oona, Ava; Oona, Abba,” I say.

We are standing in a circle now, smiling brightly but not talking much. I sense a slight strain, but the party is young and may yet come to life. The bell again. It is another man—Ugo Betti, the Italian playwright. A bit hurriedly, I introduce him to the circle. “Ugo, Yma; Ugo, Ava; Ugo, Oona; Ugo, Abba,” I say.

Miss Sumac gives me an enigmatic glance that I try to interpret. Boredom? Thirst? No, she looks almost
irritated.
Hastily, I replenish everyone’s glass. For some reason, I begin to hope that no other guests have been invited. The doorbell rings once again, however, and I open the door on two lovely actresses, Ona Munson and Ida Lupino. This gives me a happy inspiration for my introductions. “Ona and Ida,” I say, “surely you know Yma and Ava? Ida, Ona—Oona, Abba.” Damn! It doesn’t come out even. “Ida, Ona—Ugo,” I finish lamely.

I have scarcely given Miss Munson and Miss Lupino their first drinks when I am again summoned to the door. My guests stand stony-faced as I usher in the new arrival, the young Aga Khan. He is looking exceptionally well turned out in a dinner jacket with a plaid cummerbund. Smiling too cheerfully, I introduce him to the waiting group. “Folks,” I say, using a word I have always detested, “here’s the Aga Khan!
You
know.” But there is silence, so I must continue. “Aga—Yma, Ava, Oona, Ona ’n’ Ida, Abba ’n’ Ugo.”

The Aga Khan and Mr. Eban, I notice, take an immediate dislike to each other, and I begin to feel an unmistakable pall descending over my party. I suggest a game of charades. This is met with glacial looks from everyone, including Miss Gardner, whose earlier affection for me has now totally vanished. When the doorbell rings this time, everybody turns and glares at the door. I open it and discover another pair—Ira Wolfert, the novelist, and Ilya Ehrenburg, the
Russian
novelist. The latter, I know, is quite a man-of-the-world, so I try a new approach. “Ilya,” I say, “why don’t you just introduce yourself and Ira? You know all these lovely people, don’t you?”

“
Nyet,
” says Mr. Ehrenburg. “Can’t say that I do.”

“Oh, all
right,
” I say. “Ilya, Ira, here’s Yma, Ava, Oona. Ilya, Ira—Ona, Ida, Abba, Ugo, Aga.”

I ask Miss Sumac to sing for us. She refuses. We continue with the
glügg
and some hopelessly inane small talk. Mr. Eban and the Aga Khan stand at opposite sides of the room, eying each other. I begin to wish I’d never given the goddam party. Ona Munson jostles Ugo Betti’s elbow by accident, spilling his drink. I spring forward to put them at their ease, whipping a handkerchief from my pocket. “Never mind!” I cry. “No damage done! Ugo, you go get yourself another drink. I’ll just wipe this
glügg
off the, uh,
rügg.
” The guests fix me with narrowed eyes. At this moment, Eva Gabor, the Hungarian actress, sweeps through the door, which I have cleverly left open. Unaware of the way things are going, she embraces me and turns, beaming, to meet the others. Inevitably, I must make the introductions. I start rapidly. “Eva, meet Yma and Ava and Oona—” But then I find that Miss Gabor is pausing to hug each guest in turn, so I am forced to make the remaining introductions separately. “Eva, Ona; Eva, Ida; Eva, Ugo; Eva, Abba; Eva, Ilya; Eva, Ira; Eva, Aga.”