Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [47]
Nobody would second this.
And the little girl running the meeting told her, “Cousin Grace, you know as well as anybody here, ‘Once a Daffodil, always a Daffodil.’”
47
IT WAS AT LAST my turn to speak.
“Brothers and Sisters and Cousins—” I said, “your nation has wasted away. As you can see, your President has also become a shadow of his former shadow. You have nobody but your doddering Cousin Wilbur here.”
“You were a damn good President, Brother Billy,” somebody called from the back of the room.
“I would have liked to give my country peace as well as brotherhood and sisterhood,” I went on. “There is no peace, I’m sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again. Thank God, at least, that the machines have decided not to fight any more. It’s just people now.
“And thank God that there’s no such thing as a battle between strangers any more. I don’t care who fights who—everybody will have relatives on the other side.”
• • •
Most of the people at the meeting were not only Daffodils, but also searchers for the kidnapped Jesus. It was a disconcerting sort of audience to address, I found. No matter what I said, they kept jerking their heads this way and that, hoping to catch sight of Jesus.
But I seemed to be getting across, for they applauded or cheered at appropriate moments—so I pressed on.
• • •
“Because we’re just families, and not a nation any more,” I said, “it’s much easier for us to give and receive mercy in war.”
“I have just come from observing a battle far to the north of here, in the region of Lake Maxinkuckee. It was horses and spears and rifles and knives and pistols, and a cannon or two. I saw several people killed. I also saw many people embracing, and there seemed to be a great deal of deserting and surrendering going on.
“This much news I can bring you from the Battle of Lake Maxinkuckee:” I said—
“It is no massacre.”
48
WHILE IN INDIANAPOLIS, I received an invitation by radio from the King of Michigan. It was Napoleonic in tone. It said that the King would be pleased “to hold an audience for the President of the United States in his Summer Palace on Lake Maxinkuckee.” It said that his sentinels had been instructed to grant me safe passage. It said that the battle was over. “Victory is ours,” it said.
So my pilot and I flew there.
We left my faithful servant, Carlos Daffodil-11 Villavicencio, to spend his declining years among his countless relatives.
“Good luck, Brother Carlos,” I said.
“Home at last, Meester President, me Brudder,” he replied. “Tanks you and tanks God for everything. Lonesome no more!”
• • •
My meeting with the King of Michigan would have been called an “historic occasion” in olden times. There would have been cameras and microphones and reporters there. As it was, there were notetakers there, whom the King called his “scribes.”
And he was right to give those people with pens and paper that archaic title. Most of his soldiers could scarcely read or write.
• • •
Captain O’Hare and I landed on the manicured lawn before the King’s Summer Palace, which had been a private military academy at one time. Soldiers, who had behaved badly in the recent battle, I suppose, were on their knees everywhere, guarded by military policemen. They were cutting grass with bayonets and pocket knives and scissors—as a punishment.
• • •
Captain O’Hare and I entered the palace between two lines of soldiers. They were an honor guard of some sort, I suppose. Each one held aloft a banner, which was embroidered with the totem of his artificial extended family—an apple, an alligator, the chemical symbol for lithium, and so on.
It was such a comically trite historical situation, I thought. Aside from battles, the history of nations seemed to consist of nothing but powerless old poops like myself, heavily medicated and vaguely beloved in the long ago, coming to kiss the boots of young psychopaths.
Inside myself, I had to laugh.
• • •
I was ushered alone into the King’s spartan private quarters. It was a huge room, where the military