The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity

by Kurt Vonnegut

  When we got to the Stevens Street apartment raw materials still mattered some. Toward the end a Donald Duck comic book, War and Peace, a Ravi Shankar album, the weather, my father, a hockey game on TV, all became interchangeable parts.

  There was an international cast. André from France, Sankara from India. Being the only nonwhite, he had to fill in for Puerto Ricans, blacks, Chicanos, American Indians, etc. It was a heavy load but he did pretty well with it.

  There were two Jews, which was useful. “Sunshine Movers” came in handy. There was a pretty good collection of records and a fair-to-middling library. Unfortunately, all they had for musical instruments was a second-rate guitar and a couple of handmade bamboo flutes that, while being very groovy, didn’t play for shit.

  No non-Swarthmore people and no women, which made things a bit tricky, but like I said, the raw materials mattered less and less.

  WHAT WAS REALLY GOING ON. All I was catching was itty-bitty snatches. A word here, a sentence there. A funny smell, a funny face. Now and then a whole vignette. Putting it together was like trying to make a movie from a bunch of slides that had nothing to do with each other.

  Why is Simon turning green? Why is Sy beating me up? What’s that awful smell? Why is André winking at me? Why won’t they let me go outside? What the fuck is going on?

  What was going on was several people dealing as best they could with a very difficult, unfamiliar situation: a friend gone psychotic.

  Apparently suffering a great deal. Incoherent most of the time. Incapable of understanding anything said to him. Moaning, screaming, smashing things. Completely unpredictable. And the cherry on the whole show—he doesn’t sleep. Some six-day house guest.

  What was really going on was Simon’s job. I had other things to do. But when I did manage to check in, that I was very different from other people and being treated very strangely, and in a great deal of physical pain and not hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, walking, or talking right, was hardly delusional.

  What could they do? Putting someone in a nut house isn’t a nice thing to do to someone. There are lots of pressures in the hip community that make that sort of decision even harder to come to than normally. Doctors don’t know anything, mental hospitals are repressive, fascist, etc. Hippies are supposed to be able to take care of their own. “Schizophrenia is a sane response to an insane society.” “Mental illness is a myth.” The Sanskrit word for crazy means touched by the gods.

  I vaguely remember Sy’s threatening me. “If you don’t shut up we’ll have to put you in a nut house. You’ve been yelling all night.” I laughed. “Fine hippie, fine revolutionary, fine peace-love brother you turned out to be.”

  It was a cosmic barroom brawl. Like most it had something to do with religion. My team was fighting for minority plank No. 234: Everyone gets saved. Fighting against notions of chosen people. Trying to convince everyone that no one really knew much. For sure no one had come even close to putting it all together. So the best we could do was present a united front of ignorance rather than our pathetic fragmented pretensions.

  I was the clock. As long as I could keep breathing, there was still time. We were badly behind and needed all the time we could get. One of our key strategies was to find out what everyone knew or thought they knew and then publish-broadcast-ESP it to everyone. And all the time thinking that what I was thinking was absurd and very unlikely but a bet that had to be covered.

  Suddenly Sy was shaking me by the shoulders, looking very unfriendly. He must have been frustrated to the point of tears.

  Fuck shit if my crazy hunch didn’t turn out to be right. Here’s a Jew who wants to stop the clock. Well, if it comes down to one on one, me vs. Sy, no sweat. I’m not in the greatest shape but he couldn’t do much damage. Besides, wasn’t he into pacifism, peace-love, etc.?

  Boomzapplewomp! Wow! Where the hell did he learn how to throw a punch?I never saw it coming, which didn’t mean that much. There was lots of stuff I wasn’t seeing. He was slugging my chest. It was hard to tell the heartbeats from the punches. It all just rolled together. I was having a heart attack. Sy hit me a few more times. I went down hard.

  Sy was making me get up. Someone had slashed my temples with razors. There was blood. Something had something to do with Maharishi, with my old girl friend, Betsy, in Houston with Harry Reasoner and mission control and gay bars, and watching on TV something called Operation Jack-in-the-Box battling against some acid-freak mutant from the year two thousand, into time travel, trying to have things his way. I wasn’t sure which side he was on, but he had a thing about black people and electroshock and Thomas Edison and heroin and being wired to the fact that my father, besides being wanted by Israeli zealots, wasn’t able to give up smoking. And someone making me hold on to the refrigerator door handle and not being able to move a muscle. And André, where the hell were those French when you needed them, came in saying something about Paris burning and telling Sy to let up on me and that he’d be in pretty rough shape too if he’d had my dose of bad news. And I cried and cried and cried, begging Sy to just give me a little time. Maybe if I had paid more attention to Bucky Fuller. “I’ll adjust better. Please, another chance. I’ll pay better attention. Please, another chance.”

  After a while a reasonable routine for dealing with me was worked out. A twenty-four-hour watch was set, sharp and dangerous objects were put away, and things calmed down a little. There was some talk about hospitals but Simon held fast to his promise to me. There was a lot of telephoning. The Barnstable house, which was the only number I could remember, still never answered. Simon somehow managed to get my sister Edie in N.Y.C. on the line.

  “Mark?”

  “Don’t worry, Edie, I won’t tell them a thing,” and I slammed the receiver down.

  Many hours were taken up trying to decode my ravings, in hopes that if they knew more about what was going on in my mind they could snap me out of it. Most of the time I was honestly trying to be as informative and straightforward as possible, but there was so much to tell and things kept getting more and more confusing and it was so hard to understand what they were saying or make my own voice and words act right. But things seemed to be working out all right.

  HELLO. I am here. I am Mark Vonnegut and all that that entails. That’s Simon there and Sy there and André there and Sankara there. We all went to Swarthmore. We are in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I can remember lots of things. I can think about things. I can understand what people are saying and they can understand what I am saying.

  It never lasts very long. It’s lasting less and less. I keep going away. It keeps getting harder and harder to come back. I stop being Mark Vonnegut. Simon stops being Simon and so on. I stop being able to remember things, think about things, or understand what people say. It stops being Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I get swept away. I keep making it back, but it’s getting tougher and tougher.

  In a funny way it’s almost fun, having everything be so fucked up and managing to adjust. I guess you might say I’m proud. Proud of me, proud of my friends for managing to deal with this thing so well. For most people this would be the end of the world. They’d panic, their friends would panic. Things would get trampled in the stampede. But we’ve kept our heads, made the necessary allowances, and can just ride this thing out.

  I’m pretty much just putting in time waiting for this cloud to blow over. Waiting for something to come along to make some sense out of all this. Killing time, waiting for some sort of cavalry to come over the hill. There’s really not an awful lot I can do but wait. As long as there’s no panic, we can hold out damn near forever.

  AND THEN ALONG CAME WARREN. Actually we went to see him. Warren was a holy man of sorts who was supposed to drive the evil demons out of me or maybe just talk me down or at least come up with some explanation for what was wrong with me. The Stevens Street folk and Simon were getting desperate.

  We first heard about Warren from Luke. Luke was wandering around the Kootenays fee
ling very untogether. One day he came across this old man who, as Luke put it, was living the most together, organic, spiritual life he had ever seen. It was Warren. Vibes happened and something like a guru-disciple relationship went on for a few weeks. Luke credited Warren with having helped him a great deal. All this had taken place a year or so ago.

  Then we heard from Sankara, André, and Sy that they had run into a really far-out old man, long white hair, flowing white beard. He did Ching reading, numerology, and other things and had spiritual powers of some sort. They were getting more and more into him.

  Sure enough, it was Warren. I had had lots of opportunities to go see Warren but always managed to pass them up. Maybe if I had met him earlier it would have helped lessen the shock of our first encounter.

  Now there was lots of talk about Warren and all his spiritual gifts, wisdom, and powers, and that he probably knew all about whatever had gone wrong with me. I dreaded going to see him or having him come to see me. I’d never gotten on very well with guru types and was perfectly happy with the adjustments that had been made for my disabilities. Killing time till the cloud blew over. But maybe the cloud wasn’t going to blow over until I faced Warren. Maybe Warren was in charge of the cloud.

  I don’t know how many of us went. I don’t remember how we got there. I don’t even remember whether I knew we were going to see Warren.

  The door was opened by this white-haired, white-bearded man, skinny as a rail, with sunken raving eyes and a huge hook nose, in a white-robe, holy-man outfit.

  “Welcome to my temple.”

  Lots of white, incense, burning candles, little altars here and there, a mishmash of religious symbols and objects. We were supposed to sit on cushions on the floor. He had a chair.

  I can’t believe that I and these other people here are really sitting on cushions in front of this guy doing a white-robe bit in such a rinkydink put-up job of a temple.

  Gurus as a group are generally a kindly lot. But there was nothing gentle or kindly about Warren in his appearance or manner. His face and the face that had engulfed me some weeks earlier had a lot in common.

  I don’t remember much of what was said. I blocked it out at the time: Whatever else happens here, don’t let the joker trick you into saying the Lord’s prayer backward. A limited objective, you might say, but it seemed the most I could handle at the time and when I left I wasn’t even sure I had managed to achieve that.

  “Look, sweetheart, I don’t give a shit what you say.”

  “OK, pops, snap-fizzle-crack-pop. Sure, War.”

  Nothing pissed Warren off more than my calling him War, but I didn’t dig his calling me sweetheart much so I figured we were even, at least on that score.

  Disbelief, naked terror, frustration, towering rage. This can’t be happening. I have to sit here and take this shit? I was furious at Simon. I had put him in charge of reality and he had really botched it. Judas? Was this what he had been up to all along? To deliver me into the hands of War? All that feigned fuzziness, leading me along? What was in it for him? Could I come up with a counteroffer? He wouldn’t look at me. He had the look of a guilty child.

  From not eating for quite a while I had developed a facial tic to go along with the general shakiness of my whole body. I was confused, upset, scared. Warren did everything he could to amplify all this. He challenged me to try to stop the tic in my face. He seemed to be trying to impress upon me the fact that he and not I was in control of my body.

  “You are dust dust dust. You will die and nothing will remain.” True enough, but not really what I needed to hear at the time.

  Someone from the Stevens Street apartment had briefed him about me. He used the information as if he had just divined it clairvoyantly.

  “You had a girl. She is not with you now.”

  War was hooked on notions of spiritual power, satanic or angelic didn’t make much difference to him. If I had had an inclination to believe that maybe he was somehow hypnotizing me or in control of my heartbeat or an important part of some cosmic plot—candy to a baby, dope to an addict. He did everything to expand and amplify such notions.

  He talked about earthquakes and other cataclysmic events. “All this will pass away. There will be nothing left. Nothing.”

  He kept changing subjects so often or jumbling them all together that it was hard to keep anything straight.

  “Do you see the way the light comes through the curtains? Mountains will crumble into the sea. You had a girl but you didn’t love her, all you wanted to do was fuck her. I have the mayor in my pocket. I know the Koran backwards and forwards. The forests are burning out of control. The Kennedys will all be dust…”

  There was a long, long recital of my sins and transgressions. Lust was the biggie. Maybe he was going to straighten everything out by slipping me a whomping dose of acid. There was a direct link between my fuck-ups and mountains crumbling, forests burning, and all of human suffering.

  Everything was dying outside. The earth was passing away. Like the tic in my face, it was something I could do nothing about. The only safe place was in Warren’s rinkydink temple. It was like what happened when Atlantis sank, the end of the land of Mu. I had a feeling Warren and I had both been there and had more or less the same conversation. It would probably happen again at the next apocalypse. What a bore.

  I looked around the room. No women and no blacks. A petty point, I suppose.

  Warren was real. I wasn’t hallucinating him. The other people were acknowledging him as real. If Warren was real, anything was possible. His antics made my hallucinations pretty pale. The voices were the soul of rationality, salt-of-the-earth common sense, next to what he was saying. My wildest thoughts suddenly seemed much too conservative to deal with what was really happening.

  If I had been difficult to deal with before Warren, it was nothing compared to what I became afterward. A nuisance turned menace. There was indeed something very heavy and of vast proportions going on. All those thoughts, the voices and the visions, weren’t just ways to while away the time, things that I might some day turn into short stories. There was, in fact, a danger, and I was an important player in whatever was being played out.

  A clinical psychologist’s view of the situation might be that before Warren got into the act I was not actively suicidal or combative. Afterward I was. My paranoia, previously vague and intermittent, almost playful, became full-time focused and anything but playful.

  Paranoia was the best way to deal with my situation, the most hopeful way to make any sense of the things that were happening to me. If there was no sense to what was happening, no intention, malignant or benign, then there was no hope. Would you rather be chased by a pack of wild dogs that were hungry or a pack of dogs that had a master who could, if he wanted to, call them off?

  Warren himself was hauled off to the nut house a few weeks after I was. As I found out later, it wasn’t his first such trip. An interesting footnote to the whole thing is that he was picked up by the cops from the lawn in front of the Stevens Street apartment. The diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenic. A couple of weeks after that, a freak wandered in off the street claiming that God had led him there. He wrote poetry all over the wall and had busted out of a nut house somewhere in Ontario. I don’t know what it was about the Stevens Street apartment, but the odds of such a chain of events says something.

  SUICIDE. The twenty-four-hour watch system broke down from time to time. I remember coming out of a long blank during which I had made love to every living thing, ingested gallons of every poison known to man, and called the devil’s bluff in a game a lot like seven-card stud in an end-of-the-world bacchanal. I was still moving but Simon and everyone else was out cold. I had relived the history of man and it was mostly ugly, brutal, and macho. My dead grandfather was congratulating me on winning. I was the toughest bastard who had ever lived and my forefathers were very proud of me.

  I got up and went into the bathroom. The mirror in there was the best way to broadcast back to
planet earth.

  “First I’d like to thank all the billions of people, animals, and plants who made this possible.”

  Looking in the mirror I could see that my body had become a composite of all bodies. Half my face was Asian, an arm and a leg were black. But it was more subtle than that. Everything that had ever lived had contributed their best cell to make what I now called me.

  I tried to open the bathroom door but it wouldn’t budge, and I finally understood what I had to do. My life had been spiraling toward this place and moment, pulled closer and closer to the vortex, and now I was there. I cheerfully drew myself a nice hot tub, found the razor blades they hadn’t hidden very well and a gallon jug of Clorox. I wasn’t unhappy or bitter, I was humming tunes from “My Fair Lady.” I thought it would be lots of fun to see if I really could kill myself, but Simon interrupted my little party before I could decide whether it would be better to slash my wrists and then drink the Clorox or vice versa.

  At other times suicidal longings came from desperate unhappiness, but everything was so confused I couldn’t do a decent job of it. I’d become convinced that something like sitting in a certain chair, looking crosseyed at a psychedelic poster while I chanted Om and clicked my heels together, would do the trick. It became very hard for me to tell when I was committing suicide and when I wasn’t.

  I had thought a fair amount about suicide before I went nuts. It was often in connection with thinking about what sort of positive move I could make toward solving the problems of the world. The only way out of the mess the world was in that I could see was to have fewer people. Maybe killing myself and thereby making one less mouth to feed, one less body to clothe, one less excuse for the New York Times to kill trees, would do more good than anything else.