Ignatius MacFarland, page 13
We marched up the driveway that led to the White House and I was surprised to see that it actually looked pretty real and well built. I figured that Mr. Arthur probably put a lot more time and care into building the place he lived in than he did into the stuff he just had to look at as he passed by. After all, if I was going to be a crazy dictator and force a whole frequency of creatures to do my bidding and recreate my entire world from back home, I’d probably build my house well, too. I mean, who wants to live in a piece of junk?
We walked up between the tall columns in the front and the mole commander knocked on the door. A feel (one of those fish/eel-type creatures that was standing in line behind the mole guys at Artbucks, in case you forgot) answered the door. He was dressed like a butler in a tuxedo, even though the tuxedo only had one arm that was coming out of the back of the jacket, since that’s where feels’ arms are. He gave the mole commander a look that showed he didn’t like him and said, “Yes?”
“Got the Anti-Art,” said the mole commander, who clearly didn’t like the feel, either.
“Just give him to me,” said the feel, who I now noticed had a really bad version of an English accent. It was weird enough to hear a fish/eel-type creature speaking at all, but when you add a bad British accent on top of it, and a tuxedo with one arm, AND factor in that we were standing in the doorway of a fake White House, well . . . you get my point that it was weird, right?
“We need to bring him in ourselves,” said the mole commander, as if the feel were an idiot for not knowing that.
“Forget it,” said the feel in the same tone you might use if somebody said they wanted to come into your living room and take a dump on the floor. “You guys aren’t stepping one foot into this place.”
“I was told to deliver the Anti-Art to President Arthur personally,” the mole guy said like he was about three seconds away from hitting the feel.
“And you have, Commander.” (The feel said the word commander in a super sarcastic way.) “Now, give him to me.”
The feel reached out his suction cup and was about to stick it on my chest when the mole commander grabbed the feel’s arm and yanked it down.
“OW!” the feel yelled.
“Keep your sucker off my prisoner, No Legs!”
“Who you calling No Legs, Dirt-Eater?!”
“Who you calling Dirt-Eater, No Legs?!”
“Who you calling No Legs, Dirt-Eater?!”
“Who you calling Dirt-Eater, No Legs?!”
And with that rather lame exchange they suddenly started shoving each other back and forth like they were about to have a fight on the playground. I thought that maybe I could use this chance to escape when . . .
“ENOUGH!” I heard a voice yell.
The feel and the mole commander stopped fighting and we all looked through the door into the White House. There, in silk pajamas and a red velvet smoking jacket, standing on the top of a big curved staircase in front of a gigantic painting of himself dressed the exact same way, was Mr. Arthur.
“Everybody please stop fighting,” he said, less like he was mad and more like he thought the fight was kind of amusing. “Is this the way we act when we have a new guest in our house?”
He came down the stairs and walked over to us. I could see that he was wearing one of those rich-guy scarves around his neck, the kind that you tie and then tuck into the front of your shirt so that it puffs out of your open collar. I think my dad used to call them “ascots.” Whatever it was, it sort of made Mr. Arthur look like a cross between Mr. Howell, the rich guy from Gilligan’s Island, and Hugh Hefner, this old guy who owned a magazine that nobody my age was allowed to see.
“I’m sorry, sir,” said the feel as he bowed his head toward Mr. Arthur. “I didn’t want to let them in because I know how you don’t like any dirt inside the White House.”
Mr. Arthur patted the feel on its back to say “it’s okay,” and then stepped through the doorway. The mole commander and all the army guys bowed their heads as Mr. Arthur stopped and looked me up and down.
“The new Anti-Art, Your Excellency,” said the mole commander in a voice that sounded like he was trying to be really nice. “He was hiding in the flappers’ city with the girl, as you predicted.”
“I take it the girl got away?”
“Yes, sir,” said the mole as he bowed his head. “But we’ll find her.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Arthur with a smile. “I know you will.”
The mole commander and the entire army bowed over and over again as they backed away from the door. With all the bowing and walking backward I guess the creatures at the back weren’t moving fast enough and nobody could see where they were going and suddenly about forty of them, including the mole commander, all crashed into each other and fell backward like dominos. The creatures got mad in their own native languages and it sort of sounded like all the animals at a zoo swearing.
“ARTLISH ONLY, PLEASE!” yelled Mr. Arthur.
The creatures jumped up and backed away toward the fence twice as fast, this time saying, “Sorry, President Arthur!” and “It’ll never happen again, Your Excellency!” over each other. Then they all turned and ran out of the White House yard and disappeared down the street.
Mr. Arthur watched all this, then started laughing. “Oh, man, it’s funny when they do that.” Then he looked at me, got a big smile on his face, and held out his hand, palm up. “I’m Chester Arthur and I’m the president of this place. Give me five, soul man!”
It took me a few seconds to realize that he wanted me to slap him five the old-fashioned way that I used to see my dad do with his friends. But since Mr. Arthur was the president and all and since the last time I made direct contact with the hand of a leader from this world I had crushed it, I was a bit nervous to suddenly hit the hand of the guy I had just seen destroy an entire treetop city. However, he just stood there with his hand out and an expectant look on his face, which he then followed up by saying, “Don’t leave me hangin’.”
Unsure if the offense of leaving him “hangin’ ” would result in an even worse punishment than the one I was already expecting for befriending Karen, I very carefully raised my hand and slapped his excellency five.
“All riiiight! ” he said, laughing as he pointed a finger at me and snapped his thumb down like his hand was a gun. “What’s your name?”
“Uh . . . Ignatius,” I said nervously. “Ignatius Mac-Farland.”
“Holy smokes, that’s quite a name, man!” he said, laughing again. “You must have gotten teased like crazy back in our frequency. You’re from my hometown, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Dig it, man. Right on! Hey, how’d you like a tour of the White House, Ignatius MacFarland?”
Wow, I thought. Mr. Arthur is really weird.
26
IN CHESTER WE TRUST
“This, my man, is the main lobby,” Mr. Arthur said loudly, like he was giving a tour to a large group of people even though it was only me standing next to him. “The whole idea for a White House came to me in one of my many creative dreams, the same dreams where most of my best ideas come from.”
As Mr. Arthur talked, he watched the feel butler move across the lobby floor on its slithering coil and go through a door into another room. As soon as it was gone, Mr. Arthur walked up to me and gave me a playful punch on the arm, like we were the best of friends.
“So what do you think of everything you’ve seen?” he said with a look that showed he was sure I was going to say something good.
“It’s a nice lobby,” I said, a bit confused.
“No, man,” he laughed. “My city. My world. You saw all that stuff out there, didn’t you?”
“Oh, uh, yeah.” I wasn’t really quite sure what to say and was sort of hoping he wouldn’t ask me any questions like that. My mom had always said, “If you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all.” Well, I was going to have to be awfully quiet now.
“So?” he chuckled. “What did you think of it?”
I wasn’t really sure what to do. I didn’t want to lie but since this guy was also the president and since he was obviously a person who could do really bad things to someone he didn’t like, I felt like I should maybe just tell him I thought all the stuff he had passed off as his own and all the crappy buildings and clothing and stores and everything else he had forced on this frequency were really good. But I just couldn’t. I was caught in what you might call a dilemma.
“Well . . .” I said cautiously, “it looks a lot like the stuff back home.” It was a vague statement that I said in a sort of upbeat tone and so I hoped he would take it as a compliment.
“Yeah, I know, it looks like stuff back home, but what do you think of it?” he said in a voice that clearly showed he wanted me to be all “Wow, it’s great!” and “You are the most talented person I’ve ever met!”
“Well . . .” I said, even more cautiously now as my brain spun trying to figure out the most careful wording possible. “It’s pretty amazing. I really can’t believe you did it.”
Mr. Arthur got a huge smile and then held out his palm for me to slap again. “Thank you, my brother!”
Glad that I seemed to have dodged a bullet, I slapped him a sort of halfhearted five. He did the gun-hand thing at me again and gestured for me to follow him.
“So,” he said, in a really good mood, “how’d you get to this frequency?”
“I made a rocket and it blew up with me inside it,” I said, a bit embarrassed.
“Whoa, super cool! You’re lucky you didn’t kill yourself, bro.”
“Yeah. I know.” It was sort of hard to have a normal conversation with the guy, knowing all that I did about him. After seeing what he had done to the flying people’s city, I kept waiting for him to throw me in a dungeon or take a punch at me or pull out a gun and shoot me like the bad guys do in those movies where you think they’re nice and then they just suddenly kill a guy because he double-crossed them or stole their money.
Mr. Arthur walked up to a door under the staircase and pushed it open. Then he turned to me and got a smile that said he was going to show me something top secret. “Come on in, rocket man, and see where it all happens.”
Oh, man, I thought. Dungeon time. Ice pick in the back of the head. The end of Iggy.
He gestured for me to go through the door. I took a deep breath, tried to tell myself that I could kick him in the nuts like Karen did if things got dangerous, and headed in.
Yikes.
I was suddenly standing in a huge workshop that looked like a bomb had gone off inside it. There were piles of stuff everywhere, mounded all the way up to the ceiling. There were different workstations all around, as well as weird-looking electronics equipment. In one corner, big wooden boxes and cases with lights and wires sticking out and microphones that sort of looked like tennis rackets sat in a circle around a huge collection of homemade musical instruments. Giant easels with lots of half-finished versions of famous paintings like the Mona Lisa stood in another corner. A huge desk with mountains of papers and manuscripts and an oversize homemade typewriter that looked like someone had glued a bunch of baby blocks to a cash register sat in the middle of the room.
Everywhere else were various projects in different stages of completeness — a car made out of big sheets of weird looking metal, a hang glider built out of branches and some kind of rough fabric, an airplane and a helicopter that looked junkier than the rocket I had made. There was even something that looked like a huge bamboo machine gun on a stand that didn’t look anywhere near being ready to do any damage other than falling over on whoever tried to shoot it. There wasn’t one foot of space that didn’t have something piled on it, and I couldn’t tell how anybody could even walk through it all to get to the various work areas.
I looked up at Mr. Arthur, who was staring at the room proudly.
“This is where all the magic happens,” he said. “This is the place where I make everyone’s lives better.”
I looked at him, surprised by what he just said. This guy really likes himself, I thought. He looked down at me for a few seconds, like he was trying see inside my head.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he finally said. “A lot of this is based on stuff from our world. But I’m not stealing the ideas. I’m trying to make them better. I’m fixing the things about our frequency’s accomplishments that didn’t work, that weren’t good enough. Like, here, check this out, dude.”
Mr. Arthur ran through all the junk like a little kid, leaping over piles and landing each foot in empty spaces that were only big enough for one of his shoes. It was clear that to him this whole layout made sense, just like my dad’s desk, which looked like a disaster area to my mom and me but my dad could find even the smallest piece of paper on. “It’s my own personal filing system,” he used to say whenever my mom would get down on him to clean his desk, even though if the desk in my bedroom was ever messy he would call me a slob and say I was grounded unless I “made sense of that trash heap.”
Mr. Arthur grabbed the painting of the Mona Lisa off its easel and ran back over.
“See, the Mona Lisa in our frequency has this really small smile that you can barely see. In fact, some art scholars even argue about whether or not she’s really smiling. But if you look at my version of it, well . . . check it out.”
Mr. Arthur pointed at her mouth. It was smiling really big, with huge white teeth and everything.
“Now, that’s a smile!” he said, laughing the way a person does when they’re just so happy to be themselves. “And listen to this!”
He put the painting down and bounded into the middle of the room and grabbed a guitar that was made out of some kind of green wood and started to play it. As soon as I heard the opening notes, I knew it was a song that I’d heard my dad play on his car radio a million times. He always said it was the most famous rock song ever. After Mr. Arthur plunked out the opening notes, he started to sing in a really high, terrible voice.
“There’s a lady whose nose / knows what glitters is good / and she’s climbing a stairway to Kevin.” He stopped playing and looked at me with another one of his “Well, it’s pretty great, isn’t it?” faces.
“Uh . . .” I said, trying not to insult him, “who’s Kevin?”
“See, that’s just the thing, brother man,” he said, getting all excited and waving his hands around as he talked. “The original song’s called ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ But that doesn’t make any sense, you know? I mean, there’s no stairway that’s that tall. And who cares about a woman climbing up to heaven anyway, since if she is, then she’s already dead, you know?
“So I made the song more of a story about this girl who’s in love with this guy named Kevin who wears really glittery clothes because he’s, you know, like, a real cool guy in a rock band and he lives up on the second floor of her apartment building and she’s been afraid to talk to him forever. But now she’s finally decided that it’s time to tell him she loves him and so she’s climbing a . . .” He gave me a look and gestured to me to finish the sentence for him.
“Stairway to Kevin,” I said, feeling very self-conscious even though it was only the two of us in the room.
“Pretty great, huh?!” he laughed, more pleased with himself than any person has ever been in the history of the universe.
“Yeah,” was pretty much all I could say.
Are all presidents like this? I wondered.
27
INSIDE THE OVAL OFFICE
We finally got out of Mr. Arthur’s weird workshop, but only after he’d shown me pretty much everything he was working on, which was a lot of stuff. He was trying to invent a DVD, build a motorcycle, make hockey equipment, draw Superman comic books, shoot episodes of The Simpsons, genetically engineer coffee beans, design a robot — he was even trying to clone himself. The amazing thing was he was a pretty smart guy and was able to do a lot of stuff for being an English teacher. The problem was he was only a pretty smart guy and not a really smart guy and so he was only able to do stuff halfway right.
I have to admit, it was impressive that he had been able to make the materials he needed for all his projects out of stuff he found in this frequency, since there were no stores that sold electronics equipment or mechanical parts or art supplies or scientific instruments or any of the other materials that you can just buy in our world. But this also created as many problems for him as the fact that he wasn’t really smart enough to do all this stuff well. Nothing really worked the way it should have. And so everything he did and made and invented just came off as kind of terrible.
Oh, yeah, and the fact that he also thought everything he was doing was amazing didn’t help, either.
We walked down a hallway that looked a lot like the hallways I’d seen on TV programs about the inside of the White House. There was carpeting everywhere and it looked normal but when I walked on it, it sort of made a crunching noise. All I could think about was how uncomfortable it would have been to walk around this place in my bare feet.
We got to a set of double doors and he stopped in front of them.
“You ever been to the White House and visited the President, Iggy Mac?” he said like he could barely contain his excitement.
“No, sir. I’ve just seen the place on TV.”
“Well, you’ll never be able to say that again!” And with that, he pushed open the doors and revealed the Oval Office, which looked pretty much exactly the way it looked whenever I’d seen it in movies and on TV and in my government book. It had the couches and desk and chairs and tables and windows and curtains that were just like the real place. I have to admit that, of all the stuff I’d seen that Mr. Arthur had done, this was the only one that looked exactly right.
