Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [4]
He is an airline pilot now.
They are all something other than children now.
• • •
One of them is a goat farmer on a mountaintop in Jamaica. He has made come true a dream of our sister’s: To live far from the madness of cities, with animals for friends. He has no telephone or electricity.
He is desperately dependent on rainfall. He is a ruined man, if it does not rain.
• • •
The two dogs have died of old age. I used to roll around with them on rugs for hours on end, until they were all pooped out.
• • •
Yes, and our sister’s sons are candid now about a creepy business which used to worry them a lot: They cannot find their mother or their father in their memories anywhere—not anywhere.
The goat farmer, whose name is James Carmalt Adams, Jr., said this about it to me, tapping his forehead with his fingertips: “It isn’t the museum, it should be.”
The museums in children’s minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror—to protect the children from eternal grief.
• • •
For my own part, though: It would have been catastrophic if I had forgotten my sister at once. I had never told her so, but she was the person I had always written for. She was the secret of whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved. She was the secret of my technique. Any creation which has any wholeness and harmoniousness, I suspect, was made by an artist or inventor with an audience of one in mind.
Yes, and she was nice enough, or Nature was nice enough, to allow me to feel her presence for a number of years after she died—to let me go on writing for her. But then she began to fade away, perhaps because she had more important business elsewhere.
Be that as it may, she had vanished entirely as my audience by the time Uncle Alex died.
So the seat between my brother and me on the airplane seemed especially vacant to me. I filled it as best I could—with that morning’s issue of The New York Times.
• • •
While my brother and I waited for the plane to take off for Indianapolis, he made me a present of a joke by Mark Twain—about an opera Twain had seen in Italy. Twain said that he hadn’t heard anything like it “… since the orphanage burned down.”
We laughed.
• • •
He asked me politely how my work was going. I think he respects but is baffled by my work.
I said that I was sick of it, but that I had always been sick of it. I told him a remark which I had heard attributed to the writer Renata Adler, who hates writing, that a writer was a person who hated writing.
I told him, too, what my agent, Max Wilkinson, wrote to me after I complained again about what a disagreeable profession I had. This was it: “Dear Kurt—I never knew a blacksmith who was in love with his anvil.”
We laughed again, but I think the joke was partly lost on my brother. His life has been an unending honeymoon with his anvil.
• • •
I told him that I had been going to operas recently, and that the set for the first act of Tosca had looked exactly like the interior of Union Station in Indianapolis to me. While the actual opera was going on, I said, I daydreamed about putting track numbers in the archways of the set, and passing out bells and whistles to the orchestra, and staging an opera about Indianapolis during the Age of the Iron Horse.
“People from our great-grandfathers’ generation would mingle with our own, when we were young—” I said, “and all the generations in between. Arrivals and departures would be announced. Uncle Alex would leave for his job as a spy in Baltimore. You would come home from your freshman year at M.I.T.
“There would be shoals of relatives,” I said, “watching the travelers come and go—and black men to carry the luggage and shine the shoes.”
• • •
“Every so often in my opera,” I said, “the stage would turn mud-colored with uniforms. That would be a war.
“And then it would clear up again.”
• • •
After the plane took off, my brother showed me a piece of scientific apparatus which he had brought along. It was a photoelectric cell connected to a small tape recorder. He aimed the electric eye at clouds.