Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [107]
40
NOT THAT THERE is any shortage of real child-molesters, child-shooters, child-starvers, child-bombers, child-drowners, child-whippers, child-burners, and child-defenestrators on this happy planet. Turn on the TV. By the luck of the draw, though, my son Rob Roy Fenstermaker does not happen to be one of them.
OK. MY STORY is almost ended.
And here is the news that knocked the wind out of me so recently. When I heard it from my lawyer, I actually said, “Ooof!”
Hiroshi Matsumoto was dead by his own hand in his hometown of Hiroshima! But why would I care so much?
HE DID IT in the wee hours of the morning, Japanese time, of course, while sitting in his motor-driven wheelchair at the base of the monument marking the point of impact of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima when we were little boys.
He didn’t use a gun or poison. He committed hara-kiri with a knife, disemboweling himself in a ritual of self-loathing once practiced by humiliated members of the ancient caste of professional soldiers, the samurai.
And yet, so far as I am able to determine, he never shirked his duty, never stole anything, and never killed or wounded anyone.
Still waters run deep. R.I.P.
IF THERE REALLY is a big book somewhere, in which all things are written, and which is to be read line by line, omitting nothing, on Judgment Day, let it be recorded that I, when Warden of this place, moved the convicted felons out of the tents on the Quadrangle and into the surrounding buildings. They no longer had to excrete in buckets or, in the middle of the night, have their homes blown down. The buildings, except for this 1, were divided into cement-block cells intended for 2 men, but most holding 5.
The War on Drugs goes on.
I caused 2 more fences to be erected, 1 within the other, enclosing the back of the inner buildings, and with antipersonnel mines sown in between. The machine-gun nests were reinstalled in windows and doorways of the next ring of buildings, Norman Rockwell Hall, the Pahlavi Pavilion, and so on.
It was during my administration that the troops here were Federalized, a step I had recommended. That meant that they were no longer civilians in soldier suits. That meant that they were full-time soldiers, serving at the pleasure of the President. Nobody could say how much longer the War on Drugs might last. Nobody could say when they could go home again.
GENERAL FLORIO HIMSELF, accompanied by six MPs with clubs and sidearms, congratulated me on all I had done. He then took back the two stars he had loaned me, and told me that I was under arrest for the crime of insurrection. I had come to like him, and I think he had come to like me. He was simply following orders.
I asked him, as 1 comrade to another, “Does this make any sense to you? Why is this happening?”
It is a question I have asked myself many times since, maybe 5 times today between coughing fits.
His answer to it, the first answer I ever got to it, is probably the best answer I will ever get to it.
“Some ambitious young Prosecutor,” he said, “thinks you’ll make good TV.”
HIROSHI MATSUMOTO’S SUICIDE has hit me so hard, I think, because he was innocent of even the littlest misdemeanors. I doubt that he ever double-parked, even, or ran a red light when nobody else was around. And yet he executed himself in a manner that the most terrible criminal who ever lived would not deserve!
He had no feet anymore, which must have been depressing. But having no feet is no reason for a man to disembowel himself.
It had to have been the atom bomb that was dropped on him during his formative years, and not the absence of feet, that made him feel that life was a crock of doo-doo.
AS I HAVE said, he did not tell me that he had been atom-bombed until we had known each other for 2 years or more. He might never have told me about it, in my opinion, if a documentary about the Japanese “Rape of Nanking” hadn’t been shown on the prison TVs the day before. This was a program chosen at random from the prison library. A guard who did the choosing