The World of Kurt Vonnegut: Peace in Amber (2 page)

Montana Wildhack learned at a young age that she would only be loved for her flesh. Her uncle taught her this, and no one ever thought to teach her any differently. The Serenity Prayer is engraved on the locket around her neck. Listen:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.

She has read it enough to be able to read it upside down, just as it lies. The trickiest part is the last line. This is where mortals who live in three dimensions have too much expected of them. All of human misery lies here. Hubris and cowardice, too. If only it were as simple as a prayer that can fit on a locket. If only wisdom were so cheap. But men wrestle with the things they cannot change, and they ignore those that might bend to some economy of effort. Winning at wrestling is about picking your partner. Most people prefer the unconquerable brute they already know. Or maybe, if you look around, we’re addicted to a challenge. And so things go unchanged and unaccepted, and our arms and hearts grow weary.

On Tralfamadore, the applause of fists dies down, and Montana is alone and terrified in a room with a naked man. She has been here before. She knows what to do, and it is a sad thing that she does not know any better. Billy Pilgrim thinks he is a lucky man, that he is saving her. Montana feels dead inside, but this is the only feeling she has ever known. She is on the planet Tralfamadore, billions of light years from Earth, but she feels right at home in this stranger’s arms. The way a mosquito feels at peace in amber.

September 10, 2001. A storm is brewing in New York City. A clash is about to begin. Tempers will soon rise as historical conquests and slights are remembered and renewed on the eve of this fight between ancient and embittered foes.

Yes, the Boston Red Sox are playing the New York Yankees.

Roger Clemens is slated to pitch, looking for his twentieth win. It’s the last meeting of the year between the two teams. I’m there to watch. My best friend, Scott, is there, visiting from South Carolina. Kevin—my boss and the captain of a neighboring yacht—is there as well. He is also joined by his best friend. It is a coincidence, our best friends from out of town staying with us that week. It’s a Monday, and the weather is dismal. A storm comes, and then the rain, and we stand in it, naively hopeful, as fifty thousand fans slowly leak from Yankee Stadium. We splash in the rivers at the bottoms of the bleachers, while candy wrappers and empty cups drift toward distant drains. Men down on the field cover the diamond of dirt so that it won’t turn to mud, and it’s dark when they announce there won’t be any baseball. It feels less like America after that. We head home sad and soaked, but it is only rain.

Our friends had come a long way to see something distinctly New York and vastly American, and so as we pass through those glass towers toward the marina we call home, Kevin and I take our best friends up to Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center’s north tower. After a long elevator ride, we wet our insides to go with our outsides. The city sparkles from those heights. There isn’t a soiled patch of street to be seen, just wet newness, black asphalt shiny like rivers of oil. I stand with my forehead pressed to the glass, shoulder to shoulder with Andrew, a mechanic from another boat, as we both peer into that unblemished, that happy and serene America, far, far below.

“Imagine this coming down,” I say out loud. I believe it’s the mammal in me that has this thought, the mammal that can remember living in trees. It’s the same part of me that is terrified of giant lizards. It’s the part of me that makes me contemplate a fall when confronted with an abyss or some great height.

Far below Andrew and me, taillights wink on and off. A light turns green, and everyone races off all at once, in a hurry to get somewhere. After a pause, Andrew says that these buildings will always be here, that they will outlive us all. And I believe him.

“But just imagine,” my mammal brain says, “if you took this one we’re standing in down in such a way that it toppled into that guy.” My monkey paw points to the adjacent building lit up here and there by janitors and workaholics. “They’d go like dominoes,” I say, “one after the other.”

Andrew tells me the building would go straight down, however you tried to topple it. He says something about mass being pulled toward the center of the earth, something about structural loads. He tells me you’d have to make this building much stronger to sit at a lean, and so any lean at all would send everything plummeting as neat as a demolition.

My mammal brain rejects this thought. Andrew is an engineer, but I still don’t believe him. Behind us, one of the bartenders complains about the late hour and says he has to be back early in the morning to work a double. I glance at my wristwatch. It has gotten so late that it is now September 11, and there I am standing in a patch of blue and empty sky.

I’m in the lazarette of the motor yacht
Prelude
on the morning of September 11. The compartment is tight. There’s raw fiberglass against my shoulder, the site of a future itch. A Tralfamadorian would know to go ahead and scratch it. I’m sweaty and hot in that cramped space, and it’s difficult to breathe or even move. I’m loosening the last bolt on the underside of a motorized winch when I hear the boom. I hear it and I feel it. The boat shudders, the fiberglass resonating, a hollow in my chest like standing too close to a tower of speakers at a noisy concert.

Someone’s in trouble
, I think. Some jet pilot has just buzzed New York City, racing down the Hudson so low and so fast that a shock wave has been sent out to rattle tall buildings. I have an image from a film in my head, a hotshot pilot buzzing a tower, coffee spilled, a man clutching his tie and cursing. In my mind, there is nothing but exciting things happening out in the world while I work on this stupid winch. My best friend is visiting from out of town. All I want is a day off from work.

I squirm out of the tight space, leaving the ratchet set behind. I plan to come right back. I just want to see what’s going on. Up on the deck, Scott yells from inside the boat, asking me what that was. I tell him a pilot just buzzed the Hudson. Scott shakes and flaps his newspaper over to the next page, looking for something interesting. On the wharf behind
Prelude
, a crowd gathers. They shield their eyes against the low morning sun. I follow the dozens of gazes high up the north tower and spot the smoke. That hotshot pilot who buzzed the Hudson is forgotten. Here is something new. The boom and the smoke—these two things are unrelated in my mind.

A fire. An office fire. The crowd swells. Many of these people are just off the ferry from New Jersey, were heading toward that very building—but now they’re not so sure. Many others gawk for the simple newness, for the absurdity of a smoking skyscraper. What is normally a thoroughfare of pedestrian traffic has ground to a halt. On a typical morning, this is a conveyor belt of moving heads, of swinging briefcases and purses, of ties flapping and dresses swirling, expensive shoes and high heels clop-clopping on concrete. Now it is a rumor mill. It is a game of Chinese whispers. A Cessna or some small plane has crashed into the tower. No, it was something bigger.

The windows high above glow amber from the flames trapped inside. The smoke and fire march across the building, spreading. There are sirens in the distance, a noise that is such a steady backdrop to this city that it often goes unheard. But this is different. An odd cacophony. A lot of sirens. A sense of urgency.

But the fires are not urgent. They move at a crawl, and the gray smoke drifts lazily into the cloudless sky, and I can’t imagine that anyone is hurt. They will get away. They will get away. There are sirens coming, and this is just some thing to gawk at.

Montana Wildhack has been on display for as long as she can remember. Trapped and on display for as long as she can remember. She was the first one in school with breasts. She was in sixth grade when her grandma took her to Penney’s to pick out a bra. Her grandma told her that she couldn’t run around like she was, that people were watching. This was right after a family cookout. Montana and her cousins swam in the mud-brown lake. Her uncle Chip showed her how to pitch horseshoes. The next day, after church, her grandma took her shopping. The bra was tight and pinched and was hard to get on and off, but her nipples stopped getting raw from rubbing on her shirts. And like a person abducted by aliens but in complete reverse, Montana appeared suddenly from out of nowhere. She went from unpopular to the complete opposite in the course of a single summer. A flash of hormones, and suddenly a stranger was in their midst.

She was asked to join the cheer squad. She was invited to sleepovers, where every girl in school wanted to brush her hair and try on clothes with her in the bathroom. She caught them watching her in the mirror after PE. People noticed her. Her grades improved, but only in some courses. English with Mr. Mayberry and history with Mr. Thomson, where she wrote in cursive and got large red A-pluses. In math with Mrs. Pickens, where she wrote in numbers, her grades got a little worse. At school dances, the boys lined up for her, giggling, while the same girls who brushed her hair looked on, unsmiling. Life was as good as it would ever get for Montana, for every curse begins with a blessing. This is a truth the Tralfamadorians know, for they see what follows right from the start. Montana had to learn the hard way. Gradually, the way a fire moves.

Her uncle Chip won $60,000 from a scratch-off once. Montana was in eighth grade and remembers the party he threw. Uncle Chip became suddenly popular. Even Montana’s dad, who hated his brother Chip, liked him just fine all of a sudden. And at the party, Uncle Chip took Montana for a ride in his new truck. He gave her a pair of earrings and told her not to lose them, that they weren’t fakes. Then he asked her to thank him with a kiss. Montana remembers his breath tasting like beer and his hand accidentally brushing against her breast. Back at the party, she looked everywhere for her grandma, but Granny had passed away the year before. Uncle Chip would be dead a year later, as any Tralfamadorian could plainly see. Shot himself with his brand-new gun in his brand-new truck, a year’s worth of scratch-offs under the seat and stuck to the mud of his brand-new boots. So it goes.

Breasts were a lottery ticket, Montana saw. One random girl in every school wins that first pair, and at pool parties, the boys laugh and tug at those knotted bows on sunburnt backs, like ribbons on Christmas presents. She can see it now like a Tralfamadorian, how each thing leads to the other. Dating. Obsessed with the boys who are obsessed with her. Ninth grade and not a male teacher on her schedule. Ninth grade a second time with the same results. Dropping out. But life was good. A boy who graduated the year before wanted to see her steady. He showed her the college campus and said they’d get married one day. She drank too much and danced at a party, and someone offered her money to take her shirt off. There was laughter, which eventually vanished, but the money stayed real. The air was cool in that house—so cold her nipples hurt like tiny fists. The money, though, was warm from sweaty palms. This was a thing, getting paid to dance. Montana never knew before.

Everything happens twice in your life. Often, it’s quite more than that. This is a thing Tralfamadorians know and humans ignore. It’s rarely enough to suffer a thing once, the Tralfamadorians like to say. Not when you can suffer it again and again.

I ran away to Charleston, South Carolina, more than once. The first time was to elope. I was nineteen. A girl I loved was leaving to take a job on a boat, and getting married would make sure that we stayed together even while we were apart. On Tralfamadore, they would laugh, knowing what happens next.

Less than a year later, I quit my career as a computer technician, packed what I could into a car, and fled to Charleston, an emotional wreck. A chessboard there saves my life. Fleeing to Charleston saves my life. I am twenty years old and will soon divorce. So it goes.

There is a café on King Street where chess players sit on coffee-bean sacks and move around six-inch wooden soldiers, soldiers we slam down with happy violence. My hurts disappear when I move those soldiers. A stranger is sitting across from me, as strangers do in that place. Names are exchanged. “Scott,” a man says, not looking up from the board. He must be a decade older than me. The woman beside him glances up from her magazine to smile piteously at her boyfriend’s next victim. But Scott is about to save my life. As most things go, he will do this more than once.

Best friends form like fires spread. Gab turns to conversation. Familiar faces are smiled at. People have to eat, so why not grab a bite together? Like Montana Wildhack, Scott dances for a living. But it’s called ballet and wardrobe is involved, so somehow it’s more respectable. In Charleston, South Carolina, you can have a ballet studio within four blocks of a church if you want. But probably not right next door. There are limits.

When I decide I should buy a sailboat to live on, Scott goes with me to Baltimore to sail it down the coast. Neither of us know what we’re doing as we head for Charleston around Cape Hatteras in January. Boats have disappeared to the bottom of the sea here once or twice. We soon discover this is so. And it is not the last time Scott and I will see trouble from the deck of a boat. Nor is it the last time that I am certain I will die.

At the base of the Twin Towers, there is a glass dome called the Winter Garden. Palm trees stand there in the dead of winter, like the sea snakes of Zyx, trapped in a strange world. I wake up one day to find myself living in that dome. One moment, I’m attending college classes in Charleston. The next minute, I’m in an alien land, surrounded by strangers, trapped in a glass dome, wanting to scream and scream.

The line to get a bagel in this place is infuriatingly slow.

Montana bought a house in Palm Springs with her own money. Movie money. Her realtor showed her houses in the hills with nice views, but seeing out meant others could see in. She settled on a small place with a roof that needed repair, but she liked the hedge. And it had a pool, where she could lay out and feel the sun warm her flesh, touching her without touching her. Until she woke up smelling like baby oil and coconuts, a nightmare of creatures gazing in through geodesic glass, a naked stranger beside her, a horror she knew all too well.

Montana had forgotten what it meant to own her body. She had lived a life on display, first because it felt nice, later to survive, and then to profit. She wasn’t oblivious to this trade-off. There were days when the exchange made her feel powerful, when checks came in the mail from her agent and she thought of the number of men aroused by her on-screen performances. It reminded her of that party and dancing for those college boys, going home with more money than she’d ever held.

But then there were days in the middle of a shoot, brief moments of nakedness when the director yelled “cut” or the cameraman needed to change rolls, and the magic of the scene vanished and the characters around her faded back into actors. Here was when an assistant took a dozen paces to bring her a robe, and Montana Wildhack felt a chill. Here was the off-camera hell when the actor from the previous scene continued to touch her as if she were his. This was when they would ask her out. Tell her how great she was. The best ever.

On Tralfamadore, she was back on display in a geodesic dome of glass that held thousands of alien viewers at bay. This was her movie set, with its lime-green kitchen appliances, yellow lounger, sofa bed, end tables, lamps. The alien zookeepers had installed a phonograph that worked and a television set that didn’t. The latter had an image painted on the curved glass screen, an image of two cowboys dueling with pistols. Montana thought she recognized the film. She’d had sex with one of the actors a few years ago when his feature career had hit the skids and hers had not yet begun. He had played a doctor, she a nurse.

Montana remembered the trepidation she’d felt on every new shoot. Arriving at some rented house, the smell of morning coffee, a man she would perform with smiling too widely as the director introduced her. They would pump her hand, these actors, and stare at her breasts where a locket lay with its little prayer, Montana silently pining for the wisdom to know what things she might change.

Billy Pilgrim stirred on the sofa bed, and the Tralfamadorians outside the dome went wild from the sudden movement. Montana Wildhack shivered from the cold of being trapped with yet another actor. They had been on display for several months, she and Billy Pilgrim, and she was fairly certain of two things: The first was that she would never see her home again. The second, that she was pregnant.