Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [25]
He rises from his chair at the table. His eyes are still fixed on the winning card before him, according to Trout, “as if it were a shred from the Shroud of Turin.” This prick asks, “What can this mean but that things aren’t as bad as we thought they were?”
Eva Braun spoils the moment by swallowing a capsule of cyanide. Goebbels’s wife gave it to her for a wedding present. Frau Goebbels had more capsules than she needed for her immediate family. Trout wrote of Eva Braun, “Her only crime was to have allowed a monster to ejaculate in her birth canal. These things happen to the best of women.”
A Communistic 240-millimeter howitzer shell explodes atop the bunker. Flakes of calcimine from the shaken ceiling shower down on the deafened occupants. Hitler himself makes a joke, demonstrating that he still has his sense of humor. “It snows,” he says. That is a poetic way of saying, too, it is high time he killed himself, unless he wants to become a caged superstar in a traveling freak show, along with the bearded lady and the geek.
He puts a pistol to his head. Everybody says, “Nein, nein, nein.” He convinces everyone that shooting himself is the dignified thing to do. What should his last words be? He says, “How about ‘I regret nothing’?”
Goebbels replies that such a statement would be appropriate, but that the Parisian cabaret performer Edith Piaf has made a worldwide reputation by singing those same words in French for decades. “Her sobriquet,” says Goebbels, “is ‘Little Sparrow.’ You don’t want to be remembered as a little sparrow, or I miss my guess.”
Hitler still hasn’t lost his sense of humor. He says, “How about ‘BINGO’?”
But he is tired. He puts the pistol to his head again. He says, “I never asked to be born in the first place.”
The pistol goes “BANG!”
21
I am Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, whose headquarters in Amherst, New York, I have never seen. I succeeded the late author and biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov in that functionless capacity. That we have an organization, a boring business, is to let others know we are numerous. We would prefer to live our lives as Humanists and not talk about it, or think more about it than we think about breathing.
Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the Universe has been to us unknowable so far. We serve as well as we can the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.
Are we enemies of members of organized religions? No. My great war buddy Bernard V. O’Hare, now dead, lost his faith as a Roman Catholic during World War Two. I didn’t like that. I thought that was too much to lose.
I had never had faith like that, because I had been raised by interesting and moral people who, like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, were nonetheless skep-tics about what preachers said was going on. But I knew Bernie had lost something important and honorable.
Again, I did not like that, did not like it because I liked him so much.
I spoke at a Humanist Association memorial service for Dr. Asimov a few years back. I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of Humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. The room was like the court-martial scene in Trout’s “No Laughing Matter,” right before the floor of the Pacific Ocean swallowed up the third atomic bomb and Joy’s Pride and all the rest of it.
When I myself am dead, God forbid, I hope some wag will say about me, “He’s up in Heaven now.”
I like to sleep. I published a new requiem for old music in another book, in which I said it was no bad thing to want sleep for everyone as an afterlife.
I see no need up in the sky for more