Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [28]
“You don’t have a heart condition, do you Wilbur?” she said.
“No,” I said.
“If I touch you, you promise you won’t die?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Maybe I’ll die,” she said.
“I hope not,” I said.
“Just because I act like I know what’s going to happen,” she said, “doesn’t mean I know what’s going to happen. Maybe nothing will happen.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“I’ve never seen you so frightened,” she said.
“I’m human,” I said.
“You want to tell Normie what you’re scared about?” she said.
“No,” I said.
• • •
Eliza, with her fingertips almost brushing my cheek, quoted from a dirty joke Withers Witherspoon had told another servant when we were children. We had heard it through a wall. The joke had to do with a woman who was wildly responsive during sexual intercourse. In the joke, the woman warned a stranger who was beginning to make love to her.
Eliza passed on the sultry warning to me: “Keep your hat on, Buster. We may wind up miles from here.”
• • •
Then she touched me.
We became a single genius again.
25
WE WENT BERSERK. It was only by the Grace of God that we did not tumble out of the house and into the crowd on Beacon Street. Some parts of us, of which I had not been at all aware, of which Eliza had been excruciatingly aware, had been planning a reunion for a long, long time.
I could no longer tell where I stopped and Eliza began, or where Eliza and I stopped and the Universe began. It was gorgeous and it was horrible. Yes, and let this be a measure of the quantity of energy involved: The orgy went on for five whole nights and days.
• • •
Eliza and I slept for three days after that. When I at last woke up, I found myself in my own bed. I was being fed intravenously.
Eliza, as I later found out, had been taken to her own home in a private ambulance.
• • •
As for why nobody broke us up or summoned help: Eliza and I captured Norman Mushari, Jr., and poor Mother and the servants—one by one.
I have no memory of doing this.
We tied them to wooden chairs and gagged them, apparently, and set them neatly around the diningroom table.
• • •
We gave them food and water, thank Heavens, or we would have been murderers. We would not let them go to the toilet, however, and fed them nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I apparently left the house several times to get more bread and jelly and peanut butter.
And then the orgy would begin again.
• • •
I remember reading out loud to Eliza from books on pediatrics and child psychology and sociology and anthropology, and so on. I had never thrown away any book from any course I had taken.
I remember writhing embraces which alternated with periods of my sitting at my typewriter, with Eliza beside me. I was typing something with superhuman speed.
Hi ho.
• • •
When I came out of my coma, Mushari and my own lawyers had already paid my servants handsomely for the agony they had suffered at the dinner table, and for their silence as to the dreadful things they had seen.
Mother had been released from Massachusetts General Hospital, and was back in bed in Turtle Bay.
• • •
Physically, I had suffered from exhaustion and nothing more.
When I was allowed to rise, however, I was so damaged psychologically that I expected to find everything unfamiliar. If gravity had become variable on that day, as it in fact did many years later, if I had had to crawl about my house on my hands and knees, as I often do now, I would have thought it a highly appropriate response by the Universe to all I had been through.
• • •
But little had changed. The house was tidy.
The books were back in their shelves. A broken thermostat had been replaced. Three diningroom chairs had been sent out for repairs. The diningroom carpet was somewhat piebald, pale spots indicating where stains had been removed.
The one proof that something extraordinary had happened was itself a paradigm of tidiness. It was a manuscript—on a coffee table in the livingroom, where I had typed so furiously during the nightmare.
Eliza and I had somehow written a manual on childrearing.
• • •
Was it any good?