Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [19]
But the love that the robust and rosy Isadore gives her counterbalances my sadness with joy. Like almost all the members of his family, the Raspberries, Isadore has nearly all his teeth, and remains upright even when the gravity is most severe. He carries Melody around in his arms on days like that, and has offered to carry me.
The Raspberries are food-gatherers, mainly, living in and around the ruins of the New York Stock Exchange. They fish off docks. They mine for canned goods. They pick fruits and berries they find. They grow their own tomatoes and potatoes, and radishes, and little more.
They trap rats and bats and dogs and cats and birds, and eat them. A Raspberry will eat anything.
14
I WISH MELODY what our parents once wished Eliza and me: A short but happy life on an asteroid.
Hi ho.
• • •
Yes, and I have already said, Eliza and I might have had a long and happy life on an asteroid, if we had not showed off our intelligence one day. We might have been in the mansion still, burning the trees and the furniture and the bannisters and the paneling for warmth, and drooling and babbling when strangers came.
We could have raised chickens. We could have had a little vegetable garden. And we could have amused ourselves with our ever-increasing wisdom, caring nothing for its possible usefulness.
• • •
The sun is going down. Thin clouds of bats stream out from the subway—jittering, squeaking, dispersing like gas. As always, I shudder.
I can’t think of their noise as a noise. It is a disease of silence instead.
• • •
I write on—in the light of a burning rag in a bowl of animal fat.
I have a thousand candlesticks, but no candles.
Melody and Isadore play backgammon—on a board I painted on the lobby floor.
They double and redouble each other, and laugh.
• • •
They are planning a party for my one hundred and first birthday, which is a month away.
I eavesdrop on them sometimes. Old habits are hard to break. Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa is making new costumes for the occasion—for herself and her slaves. She has mountains of cloth in her storerooms in Turtle Bay. The slaves will wear pink pantaloons and golden slippers, and green silk turbans with ostrich feather plumes, I heard Melody say.
Vera will be borne to the party in a sedan chair, I’ve heard, surrounded by slaves carrying presents and food and drink and torches, and frightening away wild dogs with the clangor of dinnerbells.
Hi ho.
• • •
I must be very careful with my drinking at my birthday party. If I drank too much, I might spill the beans to everybody: That the life that awaits us after death is infinitely more tiresome than this one.
Hi ho.
15
ELIZA AND I were of course not allowed to return to consolations of idiocy. We were bawled out severely whenever we tried. Yes, and the servants and our parents found one by-product of our metamorphosis positively delicious: They were suddenly entitled to bawl us out.
What hell we caught from time to time!
• • •
Yes, and Dr. Mott was fired, and all sorts of experts were brought in.
It was fun for a while. The first doctors to arrive were specialists in hearts and lungs and kidneys and so on. When they studied us organ by organ and body fluid by body fluid, we were masterpieces of health.
They were genial. They were all family employees in a way. They were research people whose work was financed by the Swain Foundation in New York. That was how they had been so easily rounded up and brought to Galen. The family had helped them. Now they would help the family.
They joshed us a lot. One of them, I remember, said to me that it must be fun to be so tall. “What’s the weather up there like?” he said, and so on.
The joshing had a soothing effect. It gave us the mistaken impression that it did not matter how ugly we were. I still remember what an ear, nose and throat specialist said when he looked up into Eliza’s enormous sinus cavities with a flashlight. “My God, nurse—” he said, “call up the National