Gilbert Lanz Berman didn’t nod. He was too upset about the bad impression he had made on this perfect micro-woman. He had fallen in love with her. Without Desamol to protect him, he had fallen in love with Dr. Helen Newman Klein back at Caldwell as well. He had so far found love an easily manageable side effect of sobriety, just as he had managed the occasional dizziness caused by Desamol: no need for panic or drastic revisions of lifestyle. The feeling would pass. What eighteen years of daily doses of Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia had done to his lifestyle was something else again. His large intestine had become slack and pouchy and demoralized, causing him to be a loner, if for no other reason than that at any moment he might become what he himself had called, in a high-society proctologist’s office, “a carpet-bombing fart machine.”
Now the perfect Lily knelt before her catatonic Aunt Martha and crooned to her, in perfect pitch, the song “Somewhere” by the late genius Leonard Bernstein, a chain-smoker of cigarettes like Gil Berman’s mother, from the great musical comedy West Side Story. Yes, and having heard the song, Martha Jones was on her feet and simpering. Lazarus! But she did not appear to be ready to go anywhere. At any moment, she might just sit down again. Lily explained: “She feels safe in there. It’s so cold and wet outside. But she loves parades. Is there some song we all know that we can sing while we march her out to the car?”
Sheldon Hayes jumped down from the stage, so excited to be taking part in a miracle. He said: “Row, Row, Row Your Boat!” He was back in nursery school! Asserting leadership, he broke into song, clumping his feet in a march tempo. The two cops and Lily joined in, singing the endless song while marching in place. Soon Martha Jones was singing and making the floor boom with her heavy footfalls. Talk about happy!
Up the aisle, through the lobby, and out under the marquee went the nursery-school pageant: IF GOD WERE ALIVE TODAY. And Gil Berman, still onstage in a vacant house, felt like the loneliest man in the universe, with nobody to understand him and take care of him. And then came farts in a veritable fusillade.
CHAPTER 6
In his hotel room there, having been hung up on by his Wisconsin psychiatrist, Gil Berman noticed that his telephone’s message light was on, and had probably been aglow all the while. He called down to the front desk and found out a woman had left a sealed envelope for him.
Berman: “I hope it isn’t a summons.” Anything for a laugh.
“Looks like a Christmas card.”
“Ravishingly beautiful woman?” Anything for a laugh.
“About thirty, I’d say. Red hair like yours.”
“Long lost relative.” Anything for a laugh.
He went down to get it, pretending his cupped hand was a cellphone as he crossed from the elevator to the front desk: “Look, you ugly schmuck, I’m going to have you killed, and your kids, too.” Anything for a laugh.
He sat on the couch before the fireplace there in the lobby, a blaze of propane on hollow logs of iron. It felt good, and he thought of a line he might use at his next scheduled appearance, which would be at Connecticut Wesleyan. Something like this: “Here’s a cheap high you Methodists might want to try: If it was good enough for John Wesley, it ought to be good enough for you: Bake your brains in front of a fireplace.”
He would later say that, as he opened the envelope before the fire, he “felt like an English country squire in a Sherlock Holmes story, opening a curious envelope that had arrived in the post that day.” It was indeed a Christmas card, and timely, since Christmas was only two weeks away. It was nondenominational, secular humanist, since the salutation, in gold cursive letters on its cover, was simply: “Joy.” No exclamation point. The printed message inside could hardly have inflamed the most short-fused Zoroastrian or Baha’i or Parsi, or crustiest crackpot village atheist, for it was simply this: “May the season’s warmth fill your home with happiness.”
Beneath, however, was this handwritten personal message in blue ink: “Hi, funny man, I am your sister. I am currently an English teacher and drama coach and soccer coach and dorm mom at the Nellie Prior Academy, a private college preparatory school (har-dee-har-har) for girls here in Northampton. Here’s my DNA, if you don’t believe it. Where’s yours?” And there was an arrow pointing down to a dot, which was red. Menstrual blood? He sure hoped not. The signature was “Kimberley Berlin.”
He thought little more about it. Women did not make passes at him, but it was common for one to demonstrate that she thought technological progress was as much a crock of shit as he did. The red dot was evidently an attempt at satire on all the yahoo horseshit about genetic engineering: how cloning sheep and decoding the human gene chain and so on were going to make being alive so much more rewarding than it had been to date. “O.K.,” he thought to himself. “So what else is new?” He put the card back into its envelope and sailed both into the blaze of propane.
But that wasn’t quite the end of it. His brain, which he had come to consider a quite separate person, autopsied the event in search of a joke. It found one! Bingo! Pay dirt! Try this: “If DNA technology discovers who it is in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, will they kick him out?”
He mused that if this Kimberley Berlin had declared herself his daughter rather than his sister, and the desk clerk said she had red hair like his, it might have shocked him for a minute or two. He did have a daughter out in the world somewhere, who would be eighteen, too young to be a prep-school teacher. For that daughter’s sake as well as his own, he had thought about her as little as possible. What good could he be for her, or she for him? He thought it fair to assume that Fate had given her a stable, loving, dependable stepfather. How would it help anybody if a biological father were suddenly to blindside her in the backfield, so to speak? He did nonetheless find himself reminded, there in front of the fire, of another sealed envelope handed to him by another woman when he was still in Caldwell for the second time.
The woman? Dr. Helen Newman Klein. From the transcript of their second and final session of talk therapy:
B: What’s this? A fan letter or hate mail?
K:I thought you should read it at the start of this session. Then we can both make jokes for the rest of the hour. Why did the chicken cross the road, and so on.
B: Before I open it, I do want to tell you what I’ve learned from a fellow patient, a heroin addict who is also an ornithologist.
K: As long as he isn’t your brother Heathcliffe.
B: I’ll bring you up to date on Heathie in a minute. He’s in Samoa.
K: I’m sure.
B: The ornithologist is Dr. Orville Schittbein, PhD, of the Colorado School of Mines. I took the opportunity of asking him what the white stuff was in bird poop. Haven’t you always wondered that?
K: I’ve led a sheltered life. I’m still a virgin as far as bird poop is concerned.
B: You know what he told me? You’re not going to believe this.
K: Time to open the envelope, Mr. Berman.
B: He swears the white stuff in bird poop is bird poop, too.
K: And the winner is? Pretend you are Heathcliffe, Mr. Berman, passing out Oscars at the Academy Awards, and open the envelope.
B: That’s going to be so hard. We’re so unlike, Heathcliffe and me. Heathcliffe and I. Sometimes I wonder if he isn’t the love child of Babe Ruth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
But he did finally open the envelope, and here was the message she had put inside: “Aside from his many years now of abuse of cocaine, amphetamines, Desamol, and Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia, the patient Gilbert Lanz Berman may be distressed by his inability to acknowledge and deal with the fact that twenty years ago, he, figuratively rather than literally, buried his wife and child alive.”
Basic Training and If God Were Alive Today copyright © 2012 by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Literary Trust
Foreword copyright © 2012 by Nanette Vonnegut
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