Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [54]
So I think I will. It can’t be a list of names, since I never knew the name of anybody I killed. It has to be a list of dates and places. If my list of women isn’t to include high school or prostitutes, then my list of those whose lives I took shouldn’t include possibles and probables, or those killed by artillery or air strikes called in by me, and surely not all those, many of them Americans, who died as an indirect result of all my hocus pocus, all my blah blah blah.
I HAVE LONG had a sort of ballpark figure in my head. I am quite sure that I killed more people than did my brother-in-law. I hadn’t been working as a teacher at Athena very long before it occurred to me that I had almost certainly killed more people than had the mass murderer Alton Darwin or anybody else serving time in there. That didn’t trouble me, and still doesn’t. I just think it is interesting.
It is like an old movie. Does that mean that something is wrong with me?
MY LAWYER, A mere stripling, has paid me a call. Since I have no money, the Federal Government is paying him to protect me from injustice. Moreover, I cannot be tortured or otherwise compelled to testify against myself. What a Utopia!
Among my fellow prisoners here, and the 1,000s upon 1,000s of those across the lake, you better believe there’s a lot of jubilation about the Bill of Rights.
I TOLD MY lawyer about the two lists I am making. How can he help me if I don’t tell him everything.
“Why are you making them?” he said.
“To speed things up on Judgment Day,” I said.
“I thought you were an Atheist,” he said. He was hoping the Prosecuting Attorney wouldn’t get wind of that.
“You never know,” I said.
“I’m Jewish,” he said.
“I know that, and I pity you,” I said.
“Why do you pity me?” he said.
I said, “You’re trying to get through life with only half a Bible. That’s like trying to get from here to San Francisco with a road map that stops at Dubuque, Iowa.”
I TOLD HIM I wanted to be buried with my 2 lists, so that, if there really was going to be a Judgment Day, I could say to the Judge, “Judge, I have found a way to save you some precious time in Eternity. You don’t have to look me up in the Book in Which All Things Are Recorded. Here’s a list of my worst sins. Send me straight to Hell, and no argument.”
He asked to see the 2 lists, so I showed him what I had written down so far. He was delighted, and especially by their messiness. There were all sorts of marginal notes about this or that woman or this or that corpse.
“The messier the better,” he said.
“How so?” I said.
And he said, “Any fair-minded jury looking at them will have to believe that you are in a deeply disturbed mental state, and probably have been for quite some time. They will already believe that all you Vietnam veterans are crazy, because that’s their reputation.”
“But the lists aren’t based on hallucinations,” I protested. “I’m not getting them from a radio set the CIA or the flying-saucer people put in my skull while I was sleeping. It all really happened.”
“All the same,” he said serenely. “All the same, all the same.”
20
AFTER ROBERT MOELLENKAMP, broke-and-didn’t-know-it, said so grandly, “A plague on both your houses!” Jason Wilder commented that he did not feel, in the case under discussion, my case, that 2 houses were involved.
“I don’t believe there is 2 of anything involved,” he said. “I venture to say that even Mr. Hartke now agrees that this Board cannot conceive of any alternative to accepting his resignation. Am I right, Mr. Hartke?”
I got to my feet. “This is the second worst day of my life,” I said. “The first was the day we got kicked out of Vietnam. Shakespeare has been quoted twice so far. It so happens that I can quote him, too. I have always been bad at memorizing, but I had an English teacher in high school who insisted that everyone in her class know his most famous lines by heart. I never expected to speak them as being meaningful to me in real life, but now’s the time. Here goes:
“ ‘To be, or not to be: that