Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut [34]
“Dead to the world.”
“But not actually dead.”
“No.”
“How nice—to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
Derby now came to lugubrious attention.
“No—no—please—as you were. With only two men for each officer, and all the men sick, I think we can do without the usual pageantry between officers and men.”
Derby remained standing. “You seem older than the rest,” said the colonel.
Derby told him he was forty-five, which was two years older than the colonel. The colonel said that the other Americans had all shaved now, that Billy and Derby were the only two still with beards. And he said, “You know—we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. ‘My God, my God—’ I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’”
The colonel asked old Derby how he had been captured, and Derby told a tale of being in a clump of trees with about a hundred other frightened soldiers. The battle had been going on for five days. The hundred had been driven into the trees by tanks.
Derby described the incredible artificial weather that Earthlings sometimes create for other Earthlings when they don’t want those other Earth-lings to inhabit Earth any more. Shells were bursting in the treetops with terrific bangs, he said, showering down knives and needles and razorblades. Little lumps of lead in copper jackets were crisscrossing the woods under the shellbursts, zipping along much faster than sound.
A lot of people were being wounded or killed. So it goes.
Then the shelling stopped, and a hidden German with a loudspeaker told the Americans to put their weapons down and come out of the woods with their hands on the top of their heads, or the shelling would start again. It wouldn’t stop until everybody in there was dead.
So the Americans put their weapons down, and they came out of the woods with their hands on top of their heads, because they wanted to go on living, if they possibly could.
Billy traveled in time back to the veterans’ hospital again. The blanket was over his head. It was quiet outside the blanket. “Is my mother gone?” said Billy.
“Yes.”
Billy peeked out from under his blanket. His fiancée was out there now, sitting on the visitor’s chair. Her name was Valencia Merble. Valencia was the daughter of the owner of the Ilium School of Optometry. She was rich. She was as big as a house because she couldn’t stop eating. She was eating now. She was eating a Three Musketeers Candy Bar. She was wearing tri-focal lenses in harlequin frames, and the frames were trimmed with rhinestones. The glitter of the rhinestones was answered by the glitter of the diamond in her engagement ring. The diamond was insured for eighteen hundred dollars. Billy had found that diamond in Germany. It was booty of war.
Billy didn’t want to marry ugly Valencia. She was one of the symptoms of his disease. He knew he was going crazy when he heard himself proposing marriage to her, when he begged her to take the diamond ring and be his companion for life.
Billy said, “Hello,” to her, and she asked him if he wanted some candy, and he said, “No, thanks.”
She asked him how he was, and he said, “Much better, thanks.” She said that everybody at the Optometry School was sorry he was sick and hoped he would be well soon, and Billy said, “When you see ’em, tell ’em, ‘Hello.’”
She promised she would.
She asked him if there was anything she could bring him from the outside, and he said, “No. I have just about everything I want.”
“What about books?” said Valencia.
“I’m right next to one of the biggest private libraries in the world,” said Billy, meaning Eliot Rosewater’s collection of science fiction.
Rosewater was on the next bed, reading, and Billy drew him into the conversation, asked him what he was