Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [49]
EPILOGUE
DR. SWAIN DIED before he could write any more. He went to his just reward.
There was nobody to read what he had written anyway—to complain about all the loose ends of the yarn he had spun.
He had reached the climax of his story, at any rate, with his reselling of the Louisiana Purchase to a bandit chief—for a dollar he never received.
Yes, and he died proud of what he and his sister had done to reform their society, for he left this poem, perhaps hoping that someone would use it for his epitaph:
“And how did we then face the odds,
“Of man’s rude slapstick, yes, and God’s?
“Quite at home and unafraid,
“Thank you,
“In a game our dreams remade.”
• • •
He never got to tell about the electronic device in Urbana, which made it possible for him to reunite his mind with that of his dead sister, to recreate the genius they had been in childhood.
The device, which those few people who knew about it called “The Hooligan,” consisted of a seemingly ordinary length of brown clay pipe—two meters long and twenty centimeters in diameter. It was placed just so—atop a steel cabinet containing controls for a huge particle-accelerator. The particle-accelerator was a tubular magnetic race track for subatomic entities which looped through cornfields on the edge of town.
Yes.
And the Hooligan was itself a ghost, in a way, since the particle-accelerator had been dead for a long time, for want of electricity, for want of enthusiasts for all it could do.
A janitor, Francis Iron-7 Hooligan, stored the piece of pipe atop the dead cabinet, rested his lunchpail there, too, for the moment. He heard voices from the pipe.
• • •
He fetched the scientist whose apparatus this had been, Dr. Felix Bauxite-13 von Peterswald. But the pipe refused to talk again.
Dr. von Peterswald demonstrated that he was a great scientist, however, with his willingness to believe the ignorant Mr. Hooligan. He made the janitor go over his story again and again.
“The lunchpail,” he said at last. “Where is your lunchpail?”
Hooligan had it in his hand.
Dr. von Peterswald instructed him to place it in relation to the pipe exactly as it had been before.
The pipe began promptly to talk again.
• • •
The talkers identified themselves as persons in the afterlife. They were backed by a demoralized chorus of persons who complained to each other of tedium and social slights and minor ailments, and so on.
As Dr. von Peterswald said in his secret diary: “It sounded like nothing so much as the other end of a telephone call on a rainy autumn day—to a badly run turkey farm.”
Hi ho.
• • •
When Dr. Swain talked to his sister Eliza over the Hooligan, he was in the company of the widow of Dr. von Peterswald, Wilma Pachysandra-17 von Peterswald, and her fifteen-year-old son, David Daffodil-11 von Peterswald, a brother of Dr. Swain, and a victim of Tourette’s Disease.
• • •
Poor David suffered an attack of his disease—just as Dr. Swain was beginning to talk with Eliza across the Great Divide.
David tried to choke down the involuntary stream of obscenities, but succeeded only in raising their pitch an octave. “Shit … sputum … scrotum … cloaca … asshole … pecker … mucous membrane … earwax … piss,” he said.
• • •
And Dr. Swain himself went out of control. He climbed involuntarily on top of the cabinet, as tall and old as he was. He crouched over the pipe, to be that much closer to his sister. He hung his head upside-down in front of the business end of the pipe, and knocked the crucial lunchpail to the floor, breaking the connection.
“Hello? Hello?” he said.
“Perineum … fuck … turd … glans … mount of Venus … afterbirth,” said the boy.
• • •
The widow von Peterswald was the only stable person on the Urbana end, so it was she who restored the lunchpail to its correct position. She had to jam it rather brutally between the pipe and the knee of the President. Then she found herself trapped in a grotesque position, bent at a right angle across the top of the cabinet, one arm extended, and her feet a few inches off the floor. The President had clamped down not