Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [109]
This was an expression, if I am not mistaken, which originated in California.
I WAS TEMPTED to show Hiroshi “The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore.” I’m glad I didn’t. I might now be feeling a little bit responsible for his suicide. He might have left a note saying: “The Elders of Tralfamadore win again!”
Only I and the author of that story, if he is still alive, would have known what he meant by that.
THE MOST TROUBLING part of his tale about the vaporization of all he knew and loved had to do with the edge of the area of the blast. There were all these people dying in agony. And he was only a little boy, remember.
That must have been for him like walking down the Appian Way back in 71 B.C., when 6,000 nobodies had just been crucified there. Some little kid or maybe a lot of little kids may have walked down that road back then. What could a little kid say on such an occasion? “Daddy, I think I have to go to the bathroom”?
IT SO HAPPENS that my lawyer is on a first-name basis with our Ambassador to Japan, former Senator Randolph Nakayama of California. They are of different generations, but my lawyer was a roommate of the Senator’s son at Reed College out in Portland, Oregon, the town where Tex bought his trusty rifle.
My lawyer told me that both sets of the Senator’s racially Japanese grandparents, one set immigrants, the other set native Californians, were put into a concentration camp when this country got into the Finale Rack. The camp, incidentally, was only a few kilometers west of the Donner Pass, named in honor of White cannibals. The feeling back then was that anybody with Japanese genes inside our borders was probably less loyal to the United States Constitution than to Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan.
The Senator’s father, however, served in an infantry battalion composed entirely of young Americans of Japanese extraction, which became our most decorated unit taking part in the Italian Campaign during, again, the Finale Rack.
So I asked my lawyer to find out from the Ambassador if Hiroshi had left a note, and if there had been an autopsy performed to determine whether or not the deceased had ingested some foreign substance that might have made hara-kiri easier. I don’t know whether to call this friendship or morbid curiosity.
The answer came back that there was no note, and that there had been no autopsy, since the cause of death was so horribly obvious. There was this detail: A little girl who didn’t know him was the first person of any age or sex to see what he had chosen to do to himself.
She ran and told her mama.
BACK WHEN WE were neighbors, I asked the Warden why he never left this valley, why he didn’t get away from the prison and me and the ignorant young guards and the bells across the lake and all the rest of it. He had years of leave time he had never used.
He said, “I would only meet more people.”
“You don’t like any kind of people?” I said. We were talking in a sort of joshing mode, so I could ask him that.
“I wish I had been born a bird instead,” he said. “I wish we had all been born birds instead.”
HE NEVER KILLED anybody and had the sex life of a calf kept alive for its veal alone.
I have lived more vividly, and I promised to tell at the end of this book the number I would like engraved on my tombstone, a number that represents both my 100-percent-legal military kills and my adulteries.
If people hear of the number at the end and its double significance, some will turn to the end to learn the number in order to decide that it is too small or too big or just about right or whatever without reading the book. But I have devised a lock to thwart them. I have concealed its oddly shaped key in a problem that only those who have read the whole book will have no trouble solving.
So:
Take the year Eugene Debs died.
SUBTRACT THE TITLE of the science fiction movie based on a novel by Arthur C. Clarke which I saw twice in Vietnam. Do not panic. This will give you a negative number, but Arabs in olden times taught us how to deal