Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [10]
So, from the very first, and without quite knowing what they were doing, I am sure, they begged us a thousand times a day to go on being helpless and vile.
There was only one small advancement they wished us to make up the ladder of human achievements. They hoped with all their hearts that we would become toilet-trained.
Again: We were glad to comply.
• • •
But we could secretly read and write English by the time we were four. We could read and write French, German, Italian, Latin and ancient Greek by the time we were seven, and do calculus, too.
There were thousands of books in the mansion. By the time we were ten, we had read them all by candlelight, at naptime or after bedtime—in secret passageways, or often in the mausoleum of Elihu Roosevelt Swain.
• • •
But we continued to drool and babble and so on, whenever grownups were around. It was fun.
We did not itch to display our intelligence in public. We did not think of intelligence as being useful or attractive in any way. We thought of it as being simply one more example of our freakishness, like our extra nipples and fingers and toes.
And we may have been right at that. You know?
Hi ho.
5
AND meanwhile the strange young Dr. Stewart Rawlings Mott weighed us and measured us, and peered into our orifices, and took samples of our urine—day after day after day.
“How is everybody today?” he would say.
We would tell him “Bluh” and “Duh,” and so on. We called him “Flocka Butt.”
And we ourselves did all we could to make each day exactly like the one before. Whenever “Flocka Butt” congratulated us on our healthy appetites and regular bowel movements, for example, I would invariably stick my thumbs in my ears and waggle my fingers, and Eliza would hoist her skirt and snap the elastic at the waist of her pantyhose.
Eliza and I believed then what I believe even now: That life can be painless, provided that there is sufficient peacefulness for a dozen or so rituals to be repeated simply endlessly.
Life, ideally, I think, should be like the Minuet or the Virginia Reel or the Turkey Trot, something easily mastered in a dancing school.
• • •
I teeter even now between thinking that Dr. Mott loved Eliza and me, and knew how smart we were, and wished to protect us from the cruelties of the outside world, and thinking that he was comatose.
After Mother died, I discovered that the linen chest at the foot of her bed was crammed with packets of Dr. Mott’s bi-weekly reports on the health of Eliza and me. He told of the ever-greater quantities of food being consumed and then excreted. He spoke, too, of our unflagging cheerfulness, and our natural resistance to common diseases of childhood.
The sorts of things he reported, in fact, were the sorts of things a carpenter’s helper would have had no trouble detecting—such as that, at the age of nine, Eliza and I were over two meters tall.
No matter how large Eliza and I became, though, one figure remained constant in his reports: Our mental age was between two and three.
Hi ho.
• • •
“Flocka Butt,” along with my sister, of course, is one of the few people I am really hungry to see in the afterlife.
I am dying to ask him what he really thought of us as children—how much he suspected, how much he really knew.
• • •
Eliza and I must have given him thousands of clues as to our intelligence. We weren’t the cleverest of deceivers. We were only children, after all.
It seems probable to me that, when we babbled in his presence, we used words from some foreign language which he could recognize. He may have gone into the library of the mansion, which was of no interest to the servants, and found the books somehow disturbed.
He may have discovered the secret passageways himself, through some accident. He used to wander around the house a great deal after he was through with us, I know, explaining to the servants that his father was an architect. He may have actually gone into the secret passageways,