Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [61]
Old Mildred pronounces the name of another Indiana town, Brazil, as “brazzle.”
ARTHUR K. CLARKE was coming to Tarkington to get an honorary Grand Contributor to the Arts and Sciences Degree.
The College was prevented by law from awarding any sort of degree which sounded as though the recipient had done serious work to get it. Paul Slazinger, the former Writer in Residence, I remember, objected to real institutions of higher learning giving honorary degrees with the word “Doctor” in them anywhere. He wanted them to use “Panjandrum” instead.
When the Vietnam War was going on, though, a kid could stay out of it by enrolling at Tarkington. As far as Draft Boards were concerned, Tarkington was as real a college as MIT. This could have been politics.
It must have been politics.
EVERYBODY KNEW ARTHUR Clarke was going to get a meaningless certificate. But only Tex Johnson and the campus cops and the Provost had advance warning of the spectacular entrance he planned to make. It was a regular military operation. The motorcycles, and there were about 30 of them, and the balloon had been trucked into the parking lot behind the Black Cat Café at dawn.
And then Clarke and Gloria White and the rest of them, including Henry Kissinger, had been brought down from the Rochester airport in limousines, followed by the sound truck. Kissinger wouldn’t ride a motorcycle. Neither would some others, who came all the way to the Quadrangle by limousine.
Just like the people on the motorcycles, though, the people in the limousines wore gold crash helmets decorated with dollar signs.
IT’S A GOOD thing Tex Johnson knew Clarke was coming by motorcycle, or Tex just might have shot him with the Israeli rifle he had bought in Oregon.
CLARKE’S BIG ARRIVAL wasn’t a half-bad dress rehearsal for
Judgment Day. St. John the Divine in the Bible could only imagine such an absolutely knockout show with noise and smoke and gold and lions and eagles and thrones and celebrities and marvels up in the sky and so on. But Arthur K. Clarke had created a real one with modern technology and tons of cash!
The gold-helmeted motorcyclists formed a hollow square on the Quadrangle, facing outward, making their mighty steeds roar and roar.
Workmen in white coveralls began to inflate the balloon.
The sound truck ripped the air to shreds with the recorded racket of a bagpipe band.
Arthur Clarke, astride his bike, was looking in my direction. That was because great pals of his on the Board of Trustees were waving to him from the building right behind me. I found myself deeply offended by his proof that big money could buy big happiness.
I yawned elaborately. I turned my back on him and his show. I walked away as though I had much better things to do than gape at an imbecile.
Thus did I miss seeing the balloon snap its cable and, as unattached as myself, sail over the prison across the lake.
ALL THE PRISONERS over there could see of the outside world was sky. Some of them in the exercise yard saw a castle up there for just a moment. What on Earth could the explanation be?
“THERE ARE MORE things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”—Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
THAT EMPTY CASTLE with its mooring snapped, a plaything of the wind, was a lot like me. We were so much alike, in fact, that I myself would pay a surprise visit to the prison before the Sun went down.
If the balloon had been as close to the ground as I was, it would have been blown this way and that at first, before it gained sufficient altitude for the prevailing wind to take it across the lake. What caused me to change course, however, wasn’t random gusts but the possibility of running into this person or that one who had the power to make me even more uncomfortable. I particularly did not want to run into Zuzu Johnson or the departing Artist in Residence, Pamela Ford Hall.
But life being what it was, I would of course run into both of them.
I WOULD RATHER have faced Zuzu than Pamela, since Pamela had gone all to pieces