Authors: Kurt Vonnegut
“Will that do? Is that any help to your book? Of course, you’ve really tied me down, asking me to stick to the day of the bomb. There are lots of other good anecdotes about the bomb and Father, from other days. For instance, do you know the story about Father on the day they first tested a bomb out at Alamogordo? After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, ‘Science has now known sin.’ And do you know what Father said? He said, ‘What is sin?’
“All the best,
“Newton Hoenikker”
N
EWT ADDED THESE THREE
postscripts to his letter:
“P.S. I can’t sign myself ‘fraternally yours’ because they won’t let me be your brother on account of my grades. I was only a pledge, and now they are going to take even that away from me.
“P.P.S. You call our family ‘illustrious,’ and I think you would maybe be making a mistake if you called it that in your book. I am a midget, for instance—four feet tall. And the last we heard of my brother Frank, he was wanted by the Florida police, the F.B.I., and the Treasury Department for running stolen cars to Cuba on war-surplus L.S.T.’s. So I’m pretty sure ‘illustrious’ isn’t quite the word you’re after. ‘Glamorous’ is probably closer to the truth.
“P.P.P.S. Twenty-four hours later. I have reread this letter and I can see where somebody might get the impression that I don’t do anything but sit around and remember sad things and pity myself. Actually, I am a very lucky person and I know it. I am about to marry a wonderful little girl. There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look. I am proof of that.”
N
EWT DID NOT TELL ME
who his girl friend was. But about two weeks after he wrote to me everybody in the country knew that her name was Zinka—plain Zinka. Apparently she didn’t have a last name.
Zinka was a Ukrainian midget, a dancer with the Borzoi Dance Company. As it happened, Newt saw a performance by that company in Indianapolis, before he went to Cornell. And then the company danced at Cornell. When the Cornell performance was over, little Newt was outside the stage door with a dozen long-stemmed American Beauty roses.
The newspapers picked up the story when little Zinka asked for political asylum in the United States, and then she and little Newt disappeared.
One week after that, little Zinka presented herself at the Russian Embassy. She said Americans were too materialistic. She said she wanted to go back home.
Newt took shelter in his sister’s house in Indianapolis. He gave one brief statement to the press. “It was a private matter,” he said. “It was an affair of the heart. I have no regrets. What happened is nobody’s business but Zinka’s and my own.”
One enterprising American reporter in Moscow, making inquiries about Zinka among dance people there, made the unkind discovery that Zinka was not, as she claimed, only twenty-three years old.
She was forty-two—old enough to be Newt’s mother.
I
LOAFED ON MY BOOK
about the day of the bomb.
About a year later, two days before Christmas, another story carried me through Ilium, New York, where Dr. Felix Hoenikker had done most of his work; where little Newt, Frank, and Angela had spent their formative years.
I stopped off in Ilium to see what I could see.
There were no live Hoenikkers left in Ilium, but there were plenty of people who claimed to have known well the old man and his three peculiar children.
I made an appointment with Dr. Asa Breed, Vice-president
in charge of the Research Laboratory of the General Forge and Foundry Company. I suppose Dr. Breed was a member of my
karass
, too, though he took a dislike to me almost immediately.
“Likes and dislikes have nothing to do with it,” says Bokonon—an easy warning to forget.
“I understand you were Dr. Hoenikker’s supervisor during most of his professional life,” I said to Dr. Breed on the telephone.
“On paper,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“If I actually supervised Felix,” he said, “then I’m ready now to take charge of volcanoes, the tides, and the migrations of birds and lemmings. The man was a force of nature no mortal could possibly control.”
D
R
. B
REED MADE
an appointment with me for early the next morning. He would pick me up at my hotel on his way to work, he said, thus simplifying my entry into the heavily-guarded Research Laboratory.
So I had a night to kill in Ilium. I was already in
the beginning and end of night life in Ilium, the Del Prado Hotel. Its bar, the Cape Cod Room, was a hangout for whores.
As it happened—“as it was
meant
to happen,” Bokonon would say—the whore next to me at the bar and the bartender serving me had both gone to high school with Franklin Hoenikker, the bug tormentor, the middle child, the missing son.
The whore, who said her name was Sandra, offered me delights unobtainable outside of Place Pigalle and Port Said. I said I wasn’t interested, and she was bright enough to say that she wasn’t really interested either. As things turned out, we had both overestimated our apathies, but not by much.
Before we took the measure of each other’s passions, however, we talked about Frank Hoenikker, and we talked about the old man, and we talked a little about Asa Breed, and we talked about the General Forge and Foundry Company, and we talked about the Pope and birth control, about Hitler and the Jews. We talked about phonies. We talked about truth. We talked about gangsters; we talked about business. We talked about the nice poor people who went to the electric chair; and we talked about the rich bastards who didn’t. We talked about religious people who had perversions. We talked about a lot of things.
We got drunk.
The bartender was very nice to Sandra. He liked her. He respected her. He told me that Sandra had
been chairman of the Class Colors Committee at Ilium High. Every class, he explained, got to pick distinctive colors for itself in its junior year, and then it got to wear those colors with pride.
“What colors did you pick?” I asked.
“Orange and black.”
“Those are good colors.”
“I thought so.”
“Was Franklin Hoenikker on the Class Colors Committee, too?”
“He wasn’t on anything,” said Sandra scornfully. “He never got on any committee, never played any game, never took any girl out. I don’t think he ever even talked to a girl. We used to call him Secret Agent X-9.”
“X-9?”
“You know—he was always acting like he was on his way between two secret places; couldn’t ever talk to anybody.”
“Maybe he really
did
have a very rich secret life,” I suggested.
“Nah.”
“Nah,” sneered the bartender. “He was just one of those kids who made model airplanes and jerked off all the time.”
“H
E WAS SUPPOSED TO BE
our commencement speaker,” said Sandra.
“Who was?” I asked.
“Dr. Hoenikker—the old man.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t show up.”
“So you didn’t get a commencement address?”
“Oh, we got one. Dr. Breed, the one you’re gonna see tomorrow, he showed up, all out of breath, and he gave some kind of talk.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he hoped a lot of us would have careers in science,” she said. She didn’t see anything funny in that. She was remembering a lesson that had impressed her. She was repeating it gropingly, dutifully. “He said, the trouble with the world was …”
She had to stop and think.
“The trouble with the world was,” she continued hesitatingly, “that people were still superstitious instead of scientific. He said if everybody would study science more, there wouldn’t be all the trouble there was.”
“He said science was going to discover the basic secret of life someday,” the bartender put in. He
scratched his head and frowned. “Didn’t I read in the paper the other day where they’d finally found out what it was?”
“I missed that,” I murmured.
“I saw that,” said Sandra. “About two days ago.”
“That’s right,” said the bartender.
“What
is
the secret of life?” I asked.
“I forget,” said Sandra.
“Protein,” the bartender declared. “They found out something about protein.”
“Yeah,” said Sandra, “that’s it.”
A
N OLDER BARTENDER
came over to join in our conversation in the Cape Cod Room of the Del Prado. When he heard that I was writing a book about the day of the bomb, he told me what the day had been like for him, what the day had been like in the very bar in which we sat. He had a W.C. Fields twang and a nose like a prize strawberry.
“It wasn’t the Cape Cod Room then,” he said.
“We didn’t have all these fugging nets and seashells around. It was called the Navajo Tepee in those days. Had Indian blankets and cow skulls on the walls. Had little tom-toms on the tables. People were supposed to beat on the tom-toms when they wanted service. They tried to get me to wear a war bonnet, but I wouldn’t do it. Real Navajo Indian came in here one day; told me Navajos didn’t live in tepees. ‘That’s a fugging shame,’ I told him. Before that it was the Pompeii Room, with busted plaster all over the place; but no matter what they call the room, they never change the fugging light fixtures. Never change the fugging people who come in or the fugging town outside, either. The day they dropped Hoenikker’s fugging bomb on the Japanese a bum came in and tried to scrounge a drink. He wanted me to give him a drink on account of the world was coming to an end. So I mixed him an ‘End of the World Delight.’ I gave him about a half-pint of crème de menthe in a hollowed-out pineapple, with whipped cream and a cherry on top. ‘There, you pitiful son of a bitch,’ I said to him, ‘don’t ever say I never did anything for you.’ Another guy came in, and he said he was quitting his job at the Research Laboratory; said anything a scientist worked on was sure to wind up as a weapon, one way or another. Said he didn’t want to help politicians with their fugging wars anymore. Name was Breed. I asked him if he was any relation to the boss of the fugging Research Laboratory. He said
he fugging well was. Said he was the boss of the Research Laboratory’s fugging son.”
A
H
, G
OD
, what an ugly city Ilium is!
“Ah, God,” says Bokonon, “what an ugly city every city is!”
Sleet was falling through a motionless blanket of smog. It was early morning. I was riding in the Lincoln sedan of Dr. Asa Breed. I was vaguely ill, still a little drunk from the night before. Dr. Breed was driving. Tracks of a long-abandoned trolley system kept catching the wheels of his car.
Breed was a pink old man, very prosperous, beautifully dressed. His manner was civilized, optimistic, capable, serene. I, by contrast, felt bristly, diseased, cynical. I had spent the night with Sandra.
My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat fur.
I thought the worst of everyone, and I knew some
pretty sordid things about Dr. Asa Breed, things Sandra had told me.
Sandra told me everyone in Ilium was sure that Dr. Breed had been in love with Felix Hoenikker’s wife. She told me that most people thought Breed was the father of all three Hoenikker children.
“Do you know Ilium at all?” Dr. Breed suddenly asked me.
“This is my first visit.”
“It’s a family town.”
“Sir?”
“There isn’t much in the way of night life. Everybody’s life pretty much centers around his family and his home.”
“That sounds very wholesome.”
“It is. We have very little juvenile delinquency.”
“Good.”
“Ilium has a very interesting history, you know.”
“That’s very interesting.”
“It used to be the jumping-off place, you know.”
“Sir?”
“For the Western migration.”
“Oh.”
“People used to get outfitted here.”
“That’s very interesting.”
“Just about where the Research Laboratory is now was the old stockade. That was where they held the public hangings, too, for the whole county.”
“I don’t suppose crime paid any better then than it does now.”
“There was one man they hanged here in 1782 who had murdered twenty-six people. I’ve often thought somebody ought to do a book about him sometime. George Minor Moakely. He sang a song on the scaffold. He sang a song he’d composed for the occasion.”
“What was the song about?”
“You can find the words over at the Historical Society, if you’re really interested.”
“I just wondered about the general tone.”
“He wasn’t sorry about anything.”
“Some people are like that.”
“Think of it!” said Dr. Breed. “Twenty-six people he had on his conscience!”
“The mind reels,” I said.
M
Y SICK HEAD
wobbled on my stiff neck. The trolley tracks had caught the wheels of Dr. Breed’s glossy Lincoln again.
I asked Dr. Breed how many people were trying to reach the General Forge and Foundry Company by eight o’clock, and he told me thirty thousand.
Policemen in yellow raincapes were at every intersection, contradicting with their white-gloved hands what the stop-and-go signs said.
The stop-and-go signs, garish ghosts in the sleet, went through their irrelevant tomfoolery again and again, telling the glacier of automobiles what to do. Green meant go. Red meant stop. Orange meant change and caution.
Dr. Breed told me that Dr. Hoenikker, as a very young man, had simply abandoned his car in Ilium traffic one morning.