Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut [25]
“Yes.” Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.
“Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”
They introduced an anesthetic into Billy’s atmosphere now, put him to sleep. They carried him to a cabin where he was strapped to a yellow Barca-Lounger which they had stolen from a Sears Roebuck warehouse. The hold of the saucer was crammed with other stolen merchandise, which would be used to furnish Billy’s artificial habitat in a zoo on Tralfamadore.
The terrific acceleration of the saucer as it left Earth twisted Billy’s slumbering body, distorted his face, dislodged him in time, sent him back to the war.
When he regained consciousness, he wasn’t on the flying saucer. He was in a boxcar crossing Germany again.
Some people were rising from the floor of the car, and others were lying down. Billy planned to lie down, too. It would be lovely to sleep. It was black in the car, and black outside the car, which seemed to be going about two miles an hour. The car never seemed to go any faster than that. It was a long time between clicks, between joints in the track. There would be a click, and then a year would go by, and then there would be another click.
The train often stopped to let really important trains bawl and hurtle by. Another thing it did was stop on sidings near prisons, leaving a few cars there. It was creeping across all of Germany, growing shorter all the time.
And Billy let himself down oh so gradually now, hanging onto the diagonal cross-brace in the corner in order to make himself seem nearly weightless to those he was joining on the floor. He knew it was important that he make himself nearly ghostlike when lying down. He had forgotten why, but a reminder soon came.
“Pilgrim—” said a person he was about to nestle with, “is that you?”
Billy didn’t say anything, but nestled very politely, closed his eyes.
“God damn it,” said the person. “That is you, isn’t it?” He sat up and explored Billy rudely with his hands. “It’s you, all right. Get the hell out of here.”
Now Billy sat up, too—wretched, close to tears.
“Get out of here! I want to sleep!”
“Shut up,” said somebody else.
“I’ll shut up when Pilgrim gets away from here.”
So Billy stood up again, clung to the cross-brace. “Where can I sleep?” he asked quietly.
“Not with me.”
“Not with me, you son of a bitch,” said somebody else. “You yell. You kick.”
“I do?”
“You’re God damn right you do. And whimper.”
“I do?”
“Keep the hell away from here, Pilgrim.” And now there was an acrimonious madrigal, with parts sung in all quarters of the car. Nearly everybody, seemingly, had an atrocity story of something Billy Pilgrim had done to him in his sleep. Everybody told Billy Pilgrim to keep the hell away.
So Billy Pilgrim had to sleep standing up, or not sleep at all. And food had stopped coming in through the ventilators, and the days and nights were colder all the time.
On the eighth day, the forty-year-old hobo said to Billy, “This ain’t bad. I can be comfortable anywhere.”
“You can?” said Billy.
On the ninth day, the hobo died. So it goes. His last words were, “You think this is bad? This ain’t bad.”
There was something about death and the ninth day. There was a death on the ninth day in the car ahead of Billy’s too. Roland Weary died—of gangrene that had started in his mangled feet. So it goes.
Weary, in his nearly continuous delirium, told again and again of the Three Musketeers, acknowledged that he was dying, gave many messages to be delivered to his family in Pittsburgh. Above all, he wanted to be avenged, so he said again and again the name of the person who had killed him. Everyone on the car learned the lesson well.
“Who killed me?” he would ask.
And everybody knew the answer, which was this: “Billy Pilgrim.”
Listen—on the tenth night the peg was pulled out of the hasp on Billy’s boxcar door, and the door was opened. Billy Pilgrim was lying at an angle on the corner-brace, self-crucified,