Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [42]
ONE NEW WRINKLE by the Japanese the reporter didn’t mention was that the guards wore surgical masks and rubber gloves when they were on duty, even up in the towers and atop the walls. That wasn’t to keep them from spreading infections, of course. It was to ensure that they didn’t take any of their loathsome charges’ loathsome diseases back home with them.
WHEN I WENT to work over there, I refused to wear gloves and a mask. Who could teach anybody anything while wearing such a costume?
So now I have tuberculosis.
Cough, cough, cough.
BEFORE I COULD protest to the Trustees that I certainly wouldn’t have said what I’d said about Yen and fellatio if I’d thought there was the slightest chance that a student could hear me, the background noises on the tape changed. I realized that I was about to hear something I had said in a different location. There was the pop-pop-pop of Ping-Pong balls, and a card player asked, “Who dealt this mess?” Somebody else asked somebody else to bring her a hot fudge sundae without nuts on top. She was on a diet, she said. There were rumblings like distant artillery, which were really the sound of bowling balls in the basement of the Pahlavi Pavilion.
Oh Lordy, was I ever drunk that night at the Pavilion. I was out of control. And it was a disgrace that I should have appeared before students in such a condition. I will regret it to my dying day. Cough.
IT WAS ON a cold night near the end of November of 1990, 6 months before the Trustees fired me. I know it wasn’t December, because Slazinger was still on campus, talking openly of suicide. He hadn’t yet received his Genius Grant.
When I came home from work that afternoon, to tidy up the house and make supper, I found an awful mess. Margaret and Mildred, both hags by then, had torn bedsheets into strips. I had laundered the sheets that morning, and was going to put them on our beds that night. What did they care?
They had constructed what they said was a spider web. At least it wasn’t a hydrogen bomb.
White cotton strips spliced end to end crisscrossed every which way in the front hall and living room. The newel post of the stairway was connected to the inside doorknob of the front door, and the doorknob was connected to the living room chandelier, and so on ad infinitum.
THE DAY HADN’T begun auspiciously anyway. I had found all 4 tires of my Mercedes flat. A bunch of high school kids from down below, high on alcohol or who knows what, had come up during the night like Vietcong and gone what they called “coring” again. They not only had let the air out of the tires of every expensive car they could find in the open on campus, Porsches and Jaguars and Saabs and BMWs and so on, but had taken out the valve cores. At home, I had heard, they had jars full of valve cores or necklaces of valve cores to prove how often they had gone coring. And they got my Mercedes. They got my Mercedes every time.
SO WHEN I found myself tangled in Margaret and Mildred’s spider web, my nervous system came close to the breaking point. I was the one who was going to have to clean up this mess. I was the one who was going to have to remake the beds with other sheets, and then buy more sheets the next day. I have always liked housework, or at least not minded it as much as most people seem to. But this was housework beyond the pale!
I had left the house so neat in the morning! And Margaret and Mildred weren’t getting any fun out of watching my reactions when I was tangled up in their spider web. They were hiding someplace where they couldn’t see or hear me. They expected me to play hide-and-seek, with me as “it.”
Something in me snapped. I wasn’t going to play hide-and-seek this time. I wasn’t going to take down the spider web. I wasn’t going to prepare supper. Let them come creeping out of their hiding places in an hour or whatever. Let them wonder, as I had when I walked into the spider web, what on Earth had happened to their previously dependable, forgiving Universe?
OUT INTO THE cold night