Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [29]
Hi ho.
• • •
I found it so helpful when I began to practice pediatrics in Vermont that I had it published under a pseudonym, Dr. Eli W. Rockmell, M.D., a sort of garbling of Eliza’s and my names.
The publisher thought up the title, which was So You Went and Had a Baby.
• • •
During our orgy, though, Eliza and I gave the manuscript a very different title and sort of authorship, which was this:
THE CRY OF THE NOCTURNAL
GOATSUCKER
by
BETTY AND BOBBY BROWN
26
AFTER THE ORGY, mutual terror kept us apart. I was told by our go-between, Norman Mushari, Jr., that Eliza was even more shattered by the orgy than I had been.
“I almost had to put her away again—” he said, “for good cause this time.”
• • •
Machu Picchu, the old Inca capital on the roof of the Andes in Peru, was then becoming a haven for rich people and their parasites, people fleeing social reforms and economic declines, not just in America, but in all parts of the world. There were even some full-sized Chinese there, who had declined to let their children be miniaturized.
And Eliza moved into a condominium down there, to be as far away as possible from me.
• • •
When Mushari came to my house to tell me about Eliza’s prospective move to Peru, a week after the orgy, he confessed that he himself had become severely disoriented while tied to a diningroom chair.
“You looked more and more like Frankenstein monsters to me,” he said. “I became convinced that there was a switch somewhere in the house that controlled you. I even figured out which switch it was. The minute I untied myself, I ran to it and tore it out by the roots.”
It was Mushari who had ripped the thermostat from the wall.
• • •
To demonstrate to me how changed he was, he admitted that he had been wholly motivated by self-interest when he set Eliza free. “I was a bounty-hunter,” he said, “finding rich people in mental hospitals who didn’t belong there—and setting them free. I left the poor to rot in their dungeons.”
“It was a useful service all the same,” I said.
“Christ, I don’t think so,” he said. “Practically every sane person I ever got out of a hospital went insane almost immediately afterwards.
“Suddenly I feel old,” he said. “I can’t take that any more.”
Hi ho.
• • •
Mushari was so shaken by the orgy, in fact, that he turned Eliza’s legal and financial affairs over to the same people that Mother and I used.
He came to my attention only once more, two years later, about the time I graduated from medical school—at the bottom of my class, by the way. He had patented an invention of his own. There was a photograph of him and a description of his patent on a business page in The New York Times.
There was a national mania for tap-dancing at the time. Mushari had invented taps which could be glued to the soles of shoes, and then peeled off again. A person could carry the taps in little plastic bags in a pocket or purse, according to Mushari, and put them on only when it was time to tap-dance.
27
I NEVER SAW ELIZA’S FACE again after the orgy. I heard her voice only twice more—once when I graduated from medical school, and again when I was President of the United States of America, and she had been dead for a long, long time.
Hi ho.
• • •
When Mother planned a graduation party for me at the Ritz in Boston, across from the Public Gardens, she and I never dreamed that Eliza would somehow hear of it, and would come all the way from Peru.
My twin never wrote or telephoned. Rumors about her were as vague as those coming from China. She was drinking too much, we had heard. She had taken up golf.
• • •
I was having a wonderful time at my party, when a bellboy came to tell me I was wanted outside—not just in the lobby, but in the balmy, moonlit night outdoors. Eliza was the farthest thing from my mind.
My guess, as I followed the bellboy, was that there was a Rolls-Royce from my mother parked outside.
I was reassured by the servile manner and uniform