Cat's Cradle (6 page)

“Rubber bands?”

“Don’t ask me what for. Don’t ask me what any of all this is for.”

The old man had left the laboratory a mess. What engaged my attention at once was the quantity of cheap toys lying around. There was a paper kite with a broken spine. There was a toy gyroscope, wound with string, ready to whirr and balance itself. There was a top. There was a bubble pipe. There was a fish bowl with a castle and two turtles in it.

“He loved ten-cent stores,” said Miss Faust.

“I can see he did.”

“Some of his most famous experiments were performed with equipment that cost less than a dollar.”

“A penny saved is a penny earned.”

There were numerous pieces of conventional laboratory equipment, too, of course, but they seemed drab accessories to the cheap, gay toys.

Dr. Hoenikker’s desk was piled with correspondence.

“I don’t think he ever answered a letter,” mused Miss Faust. “People had to get him on the telephone or come to see him if they wanted an answer.”

There was a framed photograph on his desk. Its back was toward me and I ventured a guess as to whose picture it was. “His wife?”

“No.”

“One of his children?”

“No.”

“Himself?”

“No.”

So I took a look. I found that the picture was of an humble little war memorial in front of a small-town courthouse. Part of the memorial was a sign that gave the names of those villagers who had died in various wars, and I thought that the sign must be the reason for the photograph. I could read the names, and I half expected to find the name Honikker among them. It wasn’t there.

“That was one of his hobbies,” said Miss Faust.

“What was?”

“Photographing how cannonballs are stacked on different courthouse lawns. Apparently how they’ve got them stacked in that picture is very unusual.”

“I see.”

“He was an unusual man.”

“I agree.”

“Maybe in a million years everybody will be as smart as he was and see things the way he did. But,
compared with the average person of today, he was as different as a man from Mars.”

“Maybe he really
was
a Martian,” I suggested.

“That would certainly go a long way toward explaining his three strange kids.”

W
HILE
M
ISS
F
AUST
and I waited for an elevator to take us to the first floor, Miss Faust said she hoped the elevator that came would not be number five. Before I could ask her why this was a reasonable wish, number five arrived.

Its operator was a small and ancient Negro whose name was Lyman Enders Knowles. Knowles was insane, I’m almost sure—offensively so, in that he grabbed his own behind and cried, “Yes, yes!” whenever he felt that he’d made a point.

“Hello, fellow anthropoids and lily pads and paddlewheels,” he said to Miss Faust and me. “Yes, yes!”

“First floor, please,” said Miss Faust coldly.

All Knowles had to do to close the door and get
us to the first floor was to press a button, but he wasn’t going to do that yet. He wasn’t going to do it, maybe, for years.

“Man told me,” He said, “that these here elevators was Mayan architecture. I never knew that till today. And I says to him, ‘What’s that make me— mayonnaise?’ Yes, yes! And while he was thinking that over, I hit him with a question that straightened him up and made him think twice as hard! Yes, yes!”

“Could we please go down, Mr. Knowles?” begged Miss Faust.

“I said to him,” said Knowles, “ ‘This here’s a research laboratory. Research means
look again
, don’t it? Means they’re looking for something they found once and it got away somehow, and now they got to research for it? How come they got to build a building like this, with mayonnaise elevators and all, and fill it with all these crazy people? What is it they’re trying to find again? Who lost what?’ Yes, yes!”

“That’s very interesting,” sighed Miss Faust. “Now, could we go down?”

“Only way we
can
go is down,” barked Knowles. “This here’s the top. You ask me to go up and wouldn’t be a thing I could do for you. Yes, yes!”

“So let’s go down,” said Miss Faust.

“Very soon now. This gentleman here been paying his respects to Dr. Hoenikker?”

“Yes,” I said. “Did you know him?”

“Intimately,”
he said. “You know what I said when he died?”

“No.”

“I said, ‘Dr. Hoenikker—he ain’t dead.’”

“Oh?”

“Just entered a new dimension. Yes, yes!”

He punched a button, and down we went.

“Did you know the Hoenikker children?” I asked him.

“Babies full of rabies,” he said. “Yes, yes!”

T
HERE WAS ONE MORE THING
I wanted to do in Ilium. I wanted to get a photograph of the old man’s tomb. So I went back to my room, found Sandra gone, picked up my camera, hired a cab.

Sleet was still coming down, acid and gray. I thought the old man’s tombstone in all that sleet might photograph pretty well, might even make a good picture for the jacket of
The Day the World Ended
.

The custodian at the cemetery gate told me how
to find the Hoenikker burial plot. “Can’t miss it,” he said. “It’s got the biggest marker in the place.”

He did not lie. The marker was an alabaster phallus twenty feet high and three feet thick. It was plastered with sleet.

“By God,” I exclaimed, getting out of the cab with my camera, “how’s that for a suitable memorial to a father of the atom bomb?” I laughed.

I asked the driver if he’d mind standing by the monument in order to give some idea of scale. And then I asked him to wipe away some of the sleet so the name of the deceased would show.

He did so.

And there on the shaft in letters six inches high, so help me God, was the word:

MOTHER

“M
OTHER
?” asked the driver, incredulously.

I wiped away more sleet and uncovered this poem:

And under this poem was yet another:

And underneath this, inset in the shaft, was a square of cement bearing the imprint of an infant’s hand. Beneath the imprint were the words:

Baby Newt.

“If that’s Mother,” said the driver, “what in hell could they have raised over Father?” He made an obscene suggestion as to what the appropriate marker might be.

We found Father close by. His memorial—as specified in his will, I later discovered—was a marble cube forty centimeters on each side.

“
FATHER
,” it said.

A
S WE WERE LEAVING
the cemetery the driver of the cab worried about the condition of his own mother’s grave. He asked if I would mind taking a short detour to look at it.

It was a pathetic little stone that marked his mother—not that it mattered.

And the driver asked me if I would mind another brief detour, this time to a tombstone salesroom across the street from the cemetery.

I wasn’t a Bokononist then, so I agreed with some peevishness. As a Bokononist, of course, I would have agreed gaily to go anywhere anyone suggested. As Bokonon says: “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”

The name of the tombstone establishment was Avram Breed and Sons. As the driver talked to the salesman I wandered among the monuments—blank monuments, monuments in memory of nothing so far.

I found a little institutional joke in the showroom: over a stone angel hung mistletoe. Cedar boughs were heaped on her pedestal, and around her marble throat was a necklace of Christmas tree lamps.

“How much for her?” I asked the salesman.

“Not for sale. She’s a hundred years old. My great-grandfather, Avram Breed, carved her.”

“This business is that old?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re a Breed?”

“The fourth generation in this location.”

“Any relation to Dr. Asa Breed, the director of the Research Laboratory?”

“His brother.” He said his name was Marvin Breed.

“It’s a small world,” I observed.

“When you put it in a cemetery, it is.” Marvin Breed was a sleek and vulgar, a smart and sentimental man.

“I
JUST CAME
from your brother’s office. I’m a writer. I was interviewing him about Dr. Hoenikker,” I said to Marvin Breed.

“There was one queer son of a bitch. Not my brother; I mean Hoenikker.”

“Did you sell him that monument for his wife?”

“I sold his kids that. He didn’t have anything to do with it. He never got around to putting any kind of marker on her grave. And then, after she’d been dead for a year or more, Hoenikker’s three kids came in here—the big tall girl, the boy, and the little baby. They wanted the biggest stone money could buy, and the two older ones had poems they’d written. They wanted the poems on the stone.

“You can laugh at that stone, if you want to,” said Marvin Breed, “but those kids got more consolation out of that than anything else money could have bought. They used to come and look at it and put flowers on it I-don’t-know-how-many-times a year.”

“It must have cost a lot.”

“Nobel Prize money bought it. Two things that money bought: a cottage on Cape Cod and that monument.”

“Dynamite money,” I marveled, thinking of the violence of dynamite and the absolute repose of a tombstone and a summer home.

“What?”

“Nobel invented dynamite.”

“Well, I guess it takes all kinds …”

Had I been a Bokononist then, pondering the miraculously intricate chain of events that had brought dynamite money to that particular tombstone company, I might have whispered, “Busy, busy, busy.”

Busy, busy, busy
, is what we Bokononists whisper
whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

But all I could say as a Christian then was, “Life is sure funny sometimes.”

“And sometimes it isn’t,” said Marvin Breed.

I
ASKED
M
ARVIN
B
REED
if he’d known Emily Hoenikker, the wife of Felix; the mother of Angela, Frank, and Newt; the woman under that monstrous shaft.

“Know her?” His voice turned tragic. “Did I
know
her, mister? Sure, I knew her. I knew Emily. We went to Ilium High together. We were co-chairmen of the Class Colors Committee then. Her father owned the Ilium Music Store. She could play every musical instrument there was. I fell so hard for her I gave up football and tried to play the violin. And then my big brother Asa came home for spring vacation from M.I.T., and I made the mistake of introducing him to my best girl.” Marvin Breed snapped his fingers. “He took her away from me just like that. I smashed up my
seventy-five-dollar violin on a big brass knob at the foot of my bed, and I went down to a florist shop and got the kind of box they put a dozen roses in, and I put the busted fiddle in the box, and I sent it to her by Western Union messenger boy.”

“Pretty, was she?”

“Pretty?” he echoed. “Mister, when I see my first lady angel, if God ever sees fit to show me one, it’ll be her wings and not her face that’ll make my mouth fall open. I’ve already seen the prettiest face that ever could be. There wasn’t a man in Ilium County who wasn’t in love with her, secretly or otherwise. She could have had any man she wanted.” He spit on his own floor. “And she had to go and marry that little Dutch son of a bitch! She was engaged to my brother, and then that sneaky little bastard hit town.” Marvin Breed snapped his fingers again. “He took her away from my big brother like that.

“I suppose it’s high treason and ungrateful and ignorant and backward and anti-intellectual to call a dead man as famous as Felix Hoenikker a son of a bitch. I know all about how harmless and gentle and dreamy he was supposed to be, how he’d never hurt a fly, how he didn’t care about money and power and fancy clothes and automobiles and things, how he wasn’t like the rest of us, how he was better than the rest of us, how he was so innocent he was practically a Jesus—except for the Son of God part …”

Marvin Breed felt it was unnecessary to complete his thought. I had to ask him to do it.

“But what?” he said, “But what?” He went to a window looking out at the cemetery gate. “But what,” he murmured at the gate and the sleet and the Hoenikker shaft that could be dimly seen.

“But,” he said, “but how the hell innocent is a man who helps make a thing like an atomic bomb? And how can you say a man had a good mind when he couldn’t even bother to do anything when the best-hearted, most beautiful woman in the world, his own wife, was dying for lack of love and understanding …”

He shuddered, “Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.”

I
T WAS IN
the tombstone salesroom that I had my first
vin-dit
, a Bokononist word meaning a sudden, very personal shove in the direction of Bokononism, in the direction of believing that God Almighty knew all about me, after all, that God Almighty had some pretty elaborate plans for me.

The
vin-dit
had to do with the stone angel under the mistletoe. The cab driver had gotten it into his head that he had to have that angel for his mother’s grave at any price. He was standing in front of it with tears in his eyes.

Marvin Breed was still staring out the window at the cemetery gate, having just said his piece about Felix Hoenikker. “The little Dutch son of a bitch may have been a modern holy man,” he added, “but Goddamn if he ever did anything he didn’t want to, and Goddamn if he didn’t get everything he ever wanted.