Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [32]
“I thought you people had no interest in us any more,” I said.
He smiled. “That was a foolish thing for us to say, Dr. Swain,” he said. “We apologize.”
“You mean that we know things that you don’t know?” I said.
“Not quite,” he said. “I mean that you used to know things that we don’t know.”
“I can’t imagine what those things would be,” I said.
“Naturally not,” he said. “I will give you a hint: I bring you greetings from your twin sister in Machu Picchu, Dr. Swain.”
“That’s not much of a hint,” I said.
“I wish very much to see the papers you and your sister put so many years ago into the funeral urn in the mausoleum of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain,” he said.
• • •
It turned out that the Chinese had sent an expedition to Machu Picchu—to recover, if they could, certain lost secrets of the Incas. Like my visitor, they were oversize for Chinese.
Yes, and Eliza approached them with a proposition. She said she knew where there were secrets which were as good or better than anything the Incas had had.
“If what I say turns out to be true,” she told them, “I want you to reward me—with a trip to your colony on Mars.”
• • •
He said that his name was Fu Manchu.
• • •
I asked him how he had got to my mantelpiece.
“The same way we get to Mars,” he replied.
30
I AGREED TO TAKE Fu Manchu out to the mausoleum. I put him in my breast pocket.
I felt very inferior to him. I was sure he had the power of life and death over me, as small as he was. Yes, and he knew so much more than I did—even about medicine, even about myself, perhaps. He made me feel immoral, too. It was greedy for me to be so big. My supper that night could have fed a thousand men his size.
• • •
The exterior doors to the mausoleum had been welded shut. So Fu Manchu and I had to enter the secret passageways, the alternative universe of my childhood, and come up through the mausoleum’s floor.
As I made our way through cobwebs, I asked him about the Chinese use of gongs in the treatment of cancer.
“We are way beyond that now,” he said.
“Maybe it is something we could still use here,” I said.
“I’m sorry—” he said from my pocket, “but your civilization, so-called, is much too primitive. You could never understand.”
“Um,” I said.
• • •
He answered all my questions that way—saying, in effect, that I was too dumb to understand anything.
• • •
When we got to the underside of the stone trapdoor to the mausoleum, I had trouble heaving it open.
“Put your shoulder into it,” he said, and, “Tap it with a brick,” and so on.
His advice was so simple-minded, that I concluded that the Chinese knew little more about dealing with gravity than I did at the time.
Hi ho.
• • •
The door finally opened, and we ascended into the mausoleum. I must have been even more frightful than usual to look at. I was swaddled in cobwebs from head to toe.
I removed Fu Manchu from my pocket, and, at his request, I placed him on top of the lead casket of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.
I had only one candle for illumination. But Fu Manchu now produced from his attaché case a tiny box. It filled the chamber with a light as brilliant as the flare that had lit Eliza’s and my reunion in Boston—so long ago.
He asked me to take the papers from the urn, which I did. They were perfectly preserved.
“This is bound to be trash,” I said.
“To you, perhaps,” he said. He asked me to flatten out the papers and spread them over the casket, which I did.
“How could we know when we were children something not known even today to the Chinese?” I said.
“Luck,” he said. He began to stroll across the papers, in his tiny black and white basketball shoes, pausing here and there to take pictures of something he had read. He seemed especially interested in our essay on gravity—or so it seems to me now, with the benefit of hindsight.
• • •
He was satisfied at last. He thanked me for my cooperation, and told me that he would now dematerialize