Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [33]
“Did you find anything at all valuable?” I asked him.
He smiled. “A ticket to Mars for a rather large Caucasian lady in Peru,” he replied.
Hi ho.
31
THREE WEEKS LATER, on the morning of my fiftieth birthday, I rode my horse Budweiser down into the hamlet—to pick up the mail.
There was a note from Eliza. It said only this: “Happy birthday to us! Going to China!”
That message was two weeks old, according to the postmark. There was fresher news in the same mail. “Regret to inform you that your sister died on Mars in an avalanche.” It was signed, “Fu Manchu.”
• • •
I read those tragic notes while standing on the old wooden porch of the post office, in the shadow of the little church next door.
An extraordinary feeling came over me, which I first thought to be psychological in origin, the first rush of grief. I seemed to have taken root on the porch. I could not pick up my feet. My features, moreover, were being dragged downward like melting wax.
The truth was that the force of gravity had increased tremendously.
There was a great crash in the church. The steeple had dropped its bell.
Then I went right through the porch, and was slammed to the earth beneath it.
• • •
In other parts of the world, of course, elevator cables were snapping, airplanes were crashing, ships were sinking, motor vehicles were breaking their axles, bridges were collapsing, and on and on.
It was terrible.
32
THAT FIRST FEROCIOUS JOLT of heavy gravity lasted less than a minute, but the world would never be the same again.
I dazedly climbed out from under the post office porch when it was over. I gathered up my mail.
Budweiser was dead. She had tried to remain standing. Her insides had fallen out.
• • •
I must have suffered something like shell shock. People were crying for help there in the hamlet, and I was the only doctor. But I simply walked away.
I remember wandering under the family apple trees.
I remember stopping at the family cemetery, and gravely opening an envelope from the Eli Lilly Company, a pharmaceutical house. Inside were a dozen sample pills, the color and size of lentils.
The accompanying literature, which I read with great care, explained that the trade name for the pills was “tri-benzo-Deportamil.” The “Deport” part of the name had reference to good deportment, to socially acceptable behavior.
The pills were a treatment for the socially unacceptable symptoms of Tourette’s Disease, whose sufferers involuntarily spoke obscenities and made insulting gestures no matter where they were.
In my disoriented state, it seemed very important that I take two of the pills immediately, which I did.
Two minutes passed, and then my whole being was flooded with contentment and confidence such as I had never felt before.
Thus began an addiction which was to last for nearly thirty years.
Hi ho.
• • •
It was a miracle that no one in my hospital died. The beds and wheelchairs of some of the heavier children had broken. One nurse crashed through the trapdoor which had once been hidden by Eliza’s bed. She broke both legs.
Mother, thank God, slept through it all.
When she woke up, I was standing at the foot of her bed. She told me again about how much she hated unnatural things.
“I know, Mother,” I said. “I couldn’t agree with you more. Back to Nature,” I said.
• • •
I do not know to this day whether that awful jolt of gravity was Nature, or whether it was an experiment by the Chinese.
I thought at the time that there was a connection between the jolt and Fu Manchu’s photographing of Eliza’s and my essay on gravity.
Yes, and, coked to the ears on tri-benzo-Deportamil, I fetched all our papers from the mausoleum.
• • •
The paper on gravity was incomprehensible to me. Eliza and I were perhaps ten thousand times as smart when we put our heads together as when we were far apart.
Our Utopian scheme for reorganizing America into thousands of artificial extended families, however, was clear. Fu Manchu had found it ridiculous, incidentally.
“This is truly the work of children,” he’d said.