Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [55]
“ ‘To die: to sleep; no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
“ ‘To die, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.’ ”
THERE WAS MORE to that speech, of course, but that was all the teacher, whose name was Mary Pratt, required us to memorize. Why overdo? It was certainly enough for the occasion, raising as it did the specter of having yet another Vietnam veteran on the faculty killing himself on school property.
I fished the key to the bell tower from my pocket and threw it into the middle of the circular table. The table was so big that somebody was going to have to climb up on it to retrieve the key, or maybe find a long stick somewhere.
“Good luck with the bells,” I said. I was out of there.
I DEPARTED SAMOZA Hall by the same route Tex Johnson had taken. I sat down on a bench at the edge of the Quadrangle, across from the library, next to the Senior Walk. It was nice to be outside.
Damon Stern, my best friend on the faculty, happened by and asked me what I was doing there.
I said I was sunning myself. I wouldn’t tell anybody I had been fired until I found myself sitting at the bar of the Black Cat Café. So Professor Stern felt free to talk cheerful nonsense. He owned a unicycle, and he could ride it, and he said he was considering riding it in the academic procession to the graduation ceremonies, which were then only about an hour in the future.
“I’m sure there are strong arguments on both sides,” I said.
He had grown up in Shelby, Wisconsin, where practically everybody, including grandmothers, could ride a unicycle. The thing was, a circus had gone broke while playing Shelby 60 years earlier and had abandoned a lot of its equipment, including several unicycles. So more and more people there learned how to ride them, and ordered more unicycles for themselves and their families. So Shelby became and remains today, so far as I know, the Unicycling Capital of the World.
“Do it!” I said.
“YOU’VE CONVINCED ME,” he said. He was happy. He was gone, and my thoughts rode the breeze and the sunbeams back to when I was still in uniform, but home from the war, and was offered a job at Tarkington. That happened in a Chinese restaurant on Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was dining with my mother-in-law and my wife, both of them still sane, and my two legitimate children, Melanie, 11, and Eugene, Jr., 8. My illegitimate son, Rob Roy, conceived in Manila only 2 weeks before, must have been the size of a BB shot.
I had been ordered to Cambridge in order to take an examination for admission as a graduate student to the Physics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I was to earn a Master’s Degree, and then return to West Point as a teacher, but still a soldier, a soldier to the end.
My family, except for the BB, was awaiting me at the Chinese restaurant while I walked there in full uniform, ribbons and all. My hair was cut short on top and shaved down to the skin on the sides and back. People looked at me as though I were a freak. I might as well have been wearing nothing but a black garterbelt.
That was how ridiculous men in uniform had become in academic communities, even though a major part of Harvard’s and MIT’s income came from research and development having to do with new weaponry. I would have been dead if it weren’t for that great gift to civilization from the Chemistry Department of Harvard, which was napalm, or sticky jellied gasoline.
IT WAS NEAR the end of the humiliating walk that somebody said to somebody else behind me, “My goodness! Is it Halloween?”
I did not respond to that insult, did not give some draft-dodging student burst eardrums and a