Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [40]
“May I ask what you’re looking for, young man?” I said.
“For our Saviour, sir,” he replied.
“You think He’s in this hotel?” I said.
“Read the leaflet, sir,” he said.
• • •
So I did—in my lonely room, with the radio on.
At the very top of the leaflet was a primitive picture of Jesus, standing and with His Body facing forward, but with His Face in profile—like a one-eyed jack in a deck of playing cards.
He was gagged. He was handcuffed. One ankle was shackled and chained to a ring fixed to the floor. There was a single perfect tear dangling from the lower lid of His Eye.
Beneath the picture was a series of questions and answers, which went as follows:
QUESTION: What is your name?
ANSWER: I am the Right Reverend William Uranium-8 Wainwright, Founder of the Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped at 3972 Ellis Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.
QUESTION: When will God send us His Son again?
ANSWER: He already has. Jesus is here among us.
QUESTION: Why haven’t we seen or heard anything about Him?
ANSWER: He has been kidnapped by the Forces of Evil.
QUESTION: What must we do?
ANSWER: We must drop whatever we are doing, and spend every waking hour in trying to find Him. If we do not, God will exercise His Option.
QUESTION: What is God’s Option?
ANSWER: He can destroy Mankind so easily, any time he chooses to.
Hi ho.
• • •
I saw the young man eating alone in the diningroom that night. I marvelled that he could jerk his head around and still eat without spilling a drop. He even looked under his plate and water glass for Jesus not once, but over and over again.
I had to laugh.
39
BUT THEN, just when everything was going so well, when Americans were happier than they had ever been, even though the country was bankrupt and falling apart, people began to die by the millions of “The Albanian Flu” in most places, and here on Manhattan of “The Green Death.”
And that was the end of the Nation. It became families, and nothing more.
Hi ho.
• • •
Oh, there were claims of Dukedoms and Kingdoms and such garbage, and armies were raised and forts were built here and there. But few people admired them. They were just more bad weather and more bad gravity that families endured from time to time.
And somewhere in there a night of actual bad gravity crumbled the foundations of Machu Picchu. The condominiums and boutiques and banks and gold bricks and jewelry and pre-Columbian art collections and the Opera House and the churches, and all that, eloped down the Andes, wound up in the sea.
I cried.
• • •
And families painted pictures everywhere of the kidnapped Jesus Christ.
• • •
People continued to send news to us at the White House for a little while. We ourselves were experiencing death and death and death, and expecting to die.
Our personal hygiene deteriorated quickly. We stopped bathing and brushing our teeth regularly. The males grew beards, and let their hair grow down to their shoulders.
We began to cannibalize the White House almost absent-mindedly, burning furniture and bannisters and paneling and picture frames and so on in the fireplaces, to keep warm.
Hortense Muskellunge-13 McBundy, my personal secretary, died of flu. My valet, Edward Straw-berry-4 Kleindienst, died of flu. My Vice-President, Mildred Helium-20 Theodorides, died of flu.
My science advisor, Dr. Albert Aquamarine-1 Piatigorsky, actually expired in my arms on the floor of the Oval Office.
He was almost as tall as I was. We must have been quite a sight on the floor.
“What does it all mean?” he said over and over again.
“I don’t know, Albert,” I said. “And maybe I’m glad I don’t know.”
“Ask a Chinaman!” he said, and he went to his reward, as the saying goes.
• • •
Now and then the telephone would ring. It became such a rare occurrence that I took to answering it personally.
“This is your President speaking,” I would say. As like as not, I would find myself talking over a tenuous, crackling circuit to some sort of mythological creature—“The King of Michigan,” perhaps, or “The Emergency Governor