Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [61]
It won’t help his case much, either, that when he was a mere stripling he lay face down on a Japanese hand grenade, and has been in and out of laughing academies ever since. He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so. Beware of gods bearing gifts!
Before he went to sleep the other night, he said that he could not help being what he was, for good or ill, that he was “that sort of molecule.”
“Until the Great Atom Smasher comes to get me, Rabo,” he said, “this is the kind of molecule I have to be.”
“And what is literature, Rabo,” he said, “but an insider’s newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called ‘thought.’”
“It’s all so clear to me now,” he said. “I understand everything.”
“That’s what you said the last time,” I reminded him.
“Well—it’s clear to me again,” he said. “I was put on Earth with only two missions: to get the Polly Madison Books the recognition they deserve as great literature, and to publish my Theory of Revolution.”
“O.K.,” I said.
“Does that sound crazy?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Two monuments I must build! One to her and one to me. A thousand years from now her books will still be read and people will still be discussing Slazinger’s Theory of Revolution.”
“That’s nice to think about,” I said.
He became foxy. “I never told you my theory, did I?” he said.
“No,” I said.
He tapped his temple with his fingertips. “That’s because I’ve kept it locked up here all these years in this potato barn,” he said. “You’re not the only old man, Rabo, who has saved the best for last.”
“What do you know about the potato barn?” I said.
“Nothing—word of honor: nothing. But why does an old man lock up anything so tight, so tight, unless he’s saving the best for last?” he said. “It takes a molecule to know a molecule.”
“What’s in my barn is not the best and is not the worst, although it wouldn’t have to be very good to be the best I ever did, and it would have to be pretty awful to be the worst,” I said. “You want to know what’s in there?”
“Sure, if you want to tell me,” he said.
“It’s the emptiest and yet the fullest of all human messages,” I said.
“Which is?” he said.
“‘Good-bye,’” I said.
House party!
And who prepares the meals and makes the beds for these increasingly fascinating guests of mine?
The indispensable Allison White! Thank goodness Mrs. Berman talked her into staying!
And while Mrs. Berman, who says she is nine tenths of the way through her latest epic, can be expected to return to Baltimore in the near future, Allison White will not leave me high and dry. For one thing, the stock market crash two weeks ago has reduced the demand for domestic help out this way. For another, she is pregnant again, and determined to carry the fetus to term. So she has begged permission to stay on with Celeste for the winter at least, and I have told her: “The more the merrier.”
Perhaps I should have scattered milestones along the route this book has taken, saying, “It is now the Fourth of July,” and “They say this is the coolest August on record, and may have something to do with the disappearance of ozone over the North Pole,” and so on. But I had no idea that this was going to be a diary as well as an autobiography.
Let me say now that Labor Day was two weeks ago, just like the stock-market crash. So zingo! There goes prosperity! And zingo! There goes another summertime!
Celeste and her friends are back in school, and she asked me this morning what I knew about the Universe. She has to write a theme about it.
“Why ask me?” I said.
“You read The New York Times every day,” she said.
So I told her that the Universe began as an eleven-pound strawberry which exploded at seven minutes past midnight three trillion years