Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [53]
“No, ‘tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve: ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague on both your houses!”
The two houses, of course, were the Montagues and the Capulets, the feuding families of Romeo and Juliet, whose nitwit hatred would indirectly cause Mercutio’s departure for Paradise.
I HAVE LIFTED this speech from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. If more people would acknowledge that they got their pearls of wisdom from that book instead of the original, it might clear the air.
IF THERE REALLY had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people’s vanity and foolishness.
19
WHEN I HEARD a few months later, after I had gone to work at Athena, that Robert Moellenkamp had been wiped out and then some by Microsecond Arbitrage, and had had to sell his boats and his horses and his El Greco and all that, I assumed he quit the Board. Tarkington’s Trustees were expected to give a lot of money to the college every year. Otherwise why would Lowell Chung’s mother, who had to have everything that was said at meetings translated into Chinese, have been tolerated as a member of the Board?
Actually, I don’t think Mrs. Chung would have become a member if another Trustee, a Caucasian Tarkington classmate of Moellenkamp’s, John W. Fedders, Jr., hadn’t grown up in Hong Kong, and so could serve as her interpreter. His father was an importer of ivory and rhinoceros horns, which many Orientals believed to be aphrodisiacs. He also traded, it was suspected, in industrial quantities of opium. Fedders was perhaps the most conceited man I ever saw out of uniform. He thought his fluency in Chinese made him as brilliant as a nuclear physicist, as though 1,000,000,000 other people, including, no doubt, 1,000,000 morons, couldn’t speak Chinese.
When I met with the Trustees 2 years ago, and they had become hostages in the stable, I was surprised to see Moellenkamp. He had been allowed to stay on the Board, even though he didn’t have a nickel. Mrs. Chung had dropped out by then. Fedders was there. Wilder, as I’ve said, had since become a Trustee. There were some other new Trustees I didn’t know.
ALL THE TRUSTEES survived the ordeal of captivity, with nothing to eat but horse meat roasted over burning furniture in the huge fireplace in the Pavilion, although Fedders would be the worse for an untreated heart attack. While he was going through the worst of it, he spoke Chinese.
I WOULDN’T BE under indictment now if I hadn’t paid a compassionate visit to the hostages. They wouldn’t have known that I was within 1,000 kilometers of Scipio. But when I appeared to them, seemingly free to come and go as I pleased, and treated with deference by the Black man who was actually guarding me, they jumped to the conclusion that I was the mastermind behind the great escape.
It was a racist conclusion, based on the belief that Black people couldn’t mastermind anything. I will say so in court.
IN VIETNAM, THOUGH, I really was the mastermind. Yes, and that still bothers me. During my last year there, when my ammunition was language instead of bullets, I invented justifications for all the killing and dying we were doing which impressed even me! I was a genius of lethal hocus pocus!
You want to know how I used to begin my speeches to fresh troops who hadn’t yet been fed into the meat grinder? I squared my shoulders and threw out my chest so they could see all my ribbons, and I roared through a bullhorn, “Men, I want you to listen, and to listen good!”
And they did, they did.
I HAVE BEEN wondering lately how many human beings I actually killed with conventional weaponry. I don’t believe it was my conscience which suggested that I do this. It was the list of women I was making, trying to remember all the names and faces and places and dates, which led to the logical