Hocus Pocus

by Kurt Vonnegut

  "You never know," I said.

  "I'm Jewish," he said.

  "I know that, and I pity you," I said.

  "Why do you pity me?" he said.

  I said, "You're trying to get through life with only half a Bible. That's like trying to get from here to San Francisco with a road map that stops at Dubuque, Iowa."

  I TOLD HIM I wanted to be buried with my 2 lists, so that, if there really was going to be a Judgment Day, I could say to the Judge, "Judge, I have found a way to save you some precious time in Eternity. You don't have to look me up in the Book in Which All Things Are Recorded. Here's a list of my worst sins. Send me straight to Hell, and no argument."

  He asked to see the 2 lists, so I showed him what I had written down so far. He was delighted, and especially by their messiness. There were all sorts of marginal notes about this or that woman or this or that corpse.

  "The messier the better," he said.

  "How so?" I said.

  And he said, "Any fair-minded jury looking at them will have to believe that you are in a deeply disturbed mental state, and probably have been for quite some time. They will already believe that all you Vietnam veterans are crazy, because that's their reputation."

  "But the lists aren't based on hallucinations," I protested. "I'm not getting them from a radio set the CIA or the flying-saucer people put in my skull while I was sleeping. It all really happened."

  "All the same," he said serenely. "All the same, all the same."

  20

  AFTER ROBERT MOELLENKAMP, broke-and-didn't-know-it, said so grandly, "A plague on both your houses!" Jason Wilder commented that he did not feel, in the case under discussion, my case, that 2 houses were involved.

  "I don't believe there is 2 of anything involved," he said. "I venture to say that even Mr. Hartke now agrees that this Board cannot conceive of any alternative to accepting his resignation. Am I right, Mr. Hartke?"

  I got to my feet. "This is the second worst day of my life," I said. "The first was the day we got kicked out of Vietnam. Shakespeare has been quoted twice so far. It so happens that I can quote him, too. I have always been bad at memorizing, but I had an English teacher in high school who insisted that everyone in her class know his most famous lines by heart. I never expected to speak them as being meaningful to me in real life, but now's the time. Here goes:

  " 'To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?

  " 'To die: to sleep; no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

  " 'To die, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.' "

  THERE WAS MORE to that speech, of course, but that was all the teacher, whose name was Mary Pratt, required us to memorize. Why overdo? It was certainly enough for the occasion, raising as it did the specter of having yet another Vietnam veteran on the faculty killing himself on school property.

  I fished the key to the bell tower from my pocket and threw it into the middle of the circular table. The table was so big that somebody was going to have to climb up on it to retrieve the key, or maybe find a long stick somewhere.

  "Good luck with the bells," I said. I was out of there.

  I DEPARTED SAMOZA Hall by the same route Tex Johnson had taken. I sat down on a bench at the edge of the Quadrangle, across from the library, next to the Senior Walk. It was nice to be outside.

  Damon Stern, my best friend on the faculty, happened by and asked me what I was doing there.

  I said I was sunning myself. I wouldn't tell anybody I had been fired until I found myself sitting at the bar of the Black Cat Cafe. So Professor Stern felt free to talk cheerful nonsense. He owned a unicycle, and he could ride it, and he said he was considering riding it in the academic procession to the graduation ceremonies, which were then only about an hour in the future.

  "I'm sure there are strong arguments on both sides," I said.

  He had grown up in Shelby, Wisconsin, where practically everybody, including grandmothers, could ride a unicycle. The thing was, a circus had gone broke while playing Shelby 60 years earlier and had abandoned a lot of its equipment, including several unicycles. So more and more people there learned how to ride them, and ordered more unicycles for themselves and their families. So Shelby became and remains today, so far as I know, the Unicycling Capital of the World.

  "Do it!" I said.

  "YOU'VE CONVINCED ME," he said. He was happy. He was gone, and my thoughts rode the breeze and the sunbeams back to when I was still in uniform, but home from the war, and was offered a job at Tarkington. That happened in a Chinese restaurant on Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was dining with my mother-in-law and my wife, both of them still sane, and my two legitimate children, Melanie, 11, and Eugene, Jr., 8. My illegitimate son, Rob Roy, conceived in Manila only 2 weeks before, must have been the size of a BB shot.

  I had been ordered to Cambridge in order to take an examination for admission as a graduate student to the Physics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I was to earn a Master's Degree, and then return to West Point as a teacher, but still a soldier, a soldier to the end.

  My family, except for the BB, was awaiting me at the Chinese restaurant while I walked there in full uniform, ribbons and all. My hair was cut short on top and shaved down to the skin on the sides and back. People looked at me as though I were a freak. I might as well have been wearing nothing but a black garterbelt.

  That was how ridiculous men in uniform had become in academic communities, even though a major part of Harvard's and MIT's income came from research and development having to do with new weaponry. I would have been dead if it weren't for that great gift to civilization from the Chemistry Department of Harvard, which was napalm, or sticky jellied gasoline.

  IT WAS NEAR the end of the humiliating walk that somebody said to somebody else behind me, "My goodness! Is it Halloween?"

  I did not respond to that insult, did not give some draft-dodging student burst eardrums and a collapsed windpipe to think about. I kept on going because my mind was swamped with much deeper reasons for unhappiness. My wife had moved herself and the kids from Fort Bragg to Baltimore, where she was going to study Physical Therapy at Johns Hopkins University. Her recently widowed mother had moved in with them. Margaret and Mildred had bought a house in Baltimore with money left to them by my father-in-law. It was their house, not mine. I didn't know anybody in Baltimore.

  What the heck was I supposed to do in Baltimore? It was exactly as though I had been killed in Vietnam, and now Margaret had to make a new life for herself. And I was a freak to my own children. They, too, looked at me as though I were wearing nothing but a black garterbelt.

  And wouldn't my wife and kids be proud of me when I told them that I hadn't been able to answer more than a quarter of the questions on the examination for admission to graduate studies in Physics at MIT?

  Welcome home!

  As I was about to go into the Chinese restaurant, two pretty girls came out. They, too, showed contempt for me and my haircut and my uniform. So I said to them, "What's the matter? Haven't you ever before seen a man wearing nothing but a black garterbelt?"

  BLACK GARTERBELTS WERE on my mind, I suppose, because I missed Jack Patton so much. I had survived the war, but he hadn't, and the present he sent me only a few days before he was shot dead, as I said before, was a skin magazine called Black Garterbelt.

  So there we were in that restaurant, with me on my third Sweet Rob Roy. Margaret and her mother, again acting as though I were 6 feet under in Arlington National Cemetery, did all the ordering. They had it served family style. Nobody asked me how I had done on the exam. Nobody asked me what it was like to be home from t
he war.

  The others gabbled on to each other about all the tourist sights they had seen that day. They hadn't come along to keep me company and give me moral support. They were there to see "Old Ironsides" and the belfry where Paul Revere had waved the lantern, signaling that the British were coming by land, and so on.

  Yes, and, speaking of belfries, it was on this same enchanted evening that I was told that my wife, the mother of my children, had a remarkable number of ancestors and collateral relatives with bats in their belfries on her mother's side. This was news to me, and to Margaret, too. We knew that Mildred had grown up in Peru, Indiana. But all she had ever said about Peru was that Cole Porter had been born there, too, and that she had been very glad to get out of there.

  Mildred had let us know that her childhood had been unhappy, but that was a long way from saying that she, which meant my wife and kids, too, was from a notorious family of loonies there.

  IT TURNED OUT that my mother-in-law had run into an old friend from her hometown, Peru, Indiana, during the tour of "Old Ironsides." Now the old friend and his wife were at the table next to ours. When I went to urinate, the old friend came with me, and told me what a hard life Mildred had had in high school, with both her mother and her mother's mother in the State Hospital for the Insane down in Indianapolis.

  "Her mother's brother, who she loved so much," he went on, shaking the last droplets from the end of his weenie, "also went nuts in her senior year, and set fires all over town. If I was her, I would have taken off like a scalded cat for Wyoming, too."

  As I say, this was news to me.

  "Funny thing--" he went on, "it never seemed to hit any of them until they were middle-aged."

  "If I'm not laughing," I said, "that's because I got out on the wrong side of the bed today."

  NO SOONER HAD I returned to our table than a young man passing behind me could not resist the impulse to touch my bristly haircut. I went absolutely ape-poop! He was slight, and had long hair, and wore a peace symbol around his neck. He looked like the singer Bob Dylan. For all I know or care, he may actually have been Bob Dylan. Whoever he was, I knocked him into a waiter carrying a heavily loaded tray.

  Chinese food flew everywhere!

  Pandemonium!

  I RAN OUTSIDE. Everybody and everything was my enemy. I was back in Vietnam!

  But a Christ-like figure loomed before me. He was wearing a suit and tie, but he had a long beard, and his eyes were full of love and pity. He seemed to know all about me, and he really did. He was Sam Wakefield, who had resigned his commission as a General, and gone over to the Peace Movement, and become President of Tarkington College.

  He said to me what he had said to me so long ago in Cleveland, at the Science Fair: "What's the hurry, Son?"

  21

  REMEMBERING MY HOMECOMING from Vietnam always puts me in mind of Bruce Bergeron, a student of mine at Tarkington. I have already mentioned Bruce. He joined the Ice Capades as a chorus boy after winning his Associate in the Arts and Sciences Degree, and was murdered in Dubuque. His father was President of the Wildlife Rescue Federation.

  When I had Bruce in Music Appreciation I played a recording of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. I explained to the class that the composition was about an actual event in history, the defeat of Napoleon in Russia. I asked the students to think of some major event in their own lives, and to imagine what kind of music might best describe it. They were to think about it for a week before telling anybody about the event or the music. I wanted their brains to cook and cook with music, with the lid on tight.

  The event Bruce Bergeron set to music in his head was getting stuck between floors in an elevator when he was maybe 6 years old, on the way with a Haitian nanny to a post-Christmas white sale at Bloomingdale's department store in New York City. They were supposed to be going to the American Museum of Natural History, but the nanny, without permission from her employers, wanted to send some bargain bedding to relatives in Haiti first.

  The elevator got stuck right below the floor where the white sale was going on. It was an automatic elevator. There was no operator. It was jammed. When it became obvious that the elevator was going to stay there, somebody pushed the alarm button, which the passengers could hear clanging far below. According to Bruce, this was the first time in his life that he had ever been in some kind of trouble that grownups couldn't take care of at once.

  THERE WAS A 2-way speaker in the elevator, and a woman's voice came on, telling the people to stay calm. Bruce remembered that she made this particular point: Nobody was to try to climb out through the trapdoor in the ceiling. If anybody did that, Bloomingdale's could not be responsible for whatever might happen to him or her afterward.

  Time went by. More time went by. To little Bruce it seemed that they had been trapped there for a century. It was probably more like 20 minutes.

  Little Bruce believed himself to be at the center of a major event in American history. He imagined that not only his parents but the President of the United States must be hearing about it on television. When they were rescued, he thought, bands and cheering crowds would greet him.

  Little Bruce expected a banquet and a medal for not panicking, and for not saying he had to go to the bathroom.

  THE ELEVATOR SUDDENLY jolted upward a few centimeters, stopped. It jolted upward a meter, an aftershock. The doors slithered open, revealing the white sale in progress behind ordinary customers, who were simply waiting for the next elevator, without any idea that there had been something wrong with that one.

  They wanted the people in there to get out so that they could get in.

  There wasn't even somebody from the management of the store to offer an anxious apology, to make certain that everybody was all right. All the actions relative to freeing the captives had taken place far away--wherever the machinery was, wherever the alarm gong was, wherever the woman was who had told them not to panic or climb out the trapdoor.

  That was that.

  THE NANNY BOUGHT some bedding, and then she and little Bruce went on to the American Museum of Natural History. The nanny made him promise not to tell his parents that they had been to Bloomingdale's, too--and he never did.

  He still hadn't told them when he spilled the beans in Music Appreciation.

  "You know what you have described to perfection?" I asked him.

  "No," he said.

  I said, "What it was like to come home from the Vietnam War."

  22

  I READ ABOUT World War II. Civilians and soldiers alike, and even little children, were proud to have played a part in it. It was impossible, seemingly, for any sort of person not to feel a part of that war, if he or she was alive while it was going on. Yes, and the suffering or death of soldiers and sailors and Marines was felt at least a little bit by everyone.

  But the Vietnam War belongs exclusively to those of us who fought in it. Nobody else had anything to do with it, supposedly. Everybody else is as pure as the driven snow. We alone are stupid and dirty, having fought such a war. When we lost, it served us right for ever having started it. The night I went temporarily insane in a Chinese restaurant on Harvard Square, everybody was a big success but me.

  BEFORE I BLEW up, Mildred's old friend from Peru, Indiana, spoke as though we were in separate businesses, as though I were a podiatrist, maybe, or a sheet-metal contractor, instead of somebody who had risked his life and sacrificed common sense and decency on his behalf.

  As it happened, he himself was in the medical-waste disposa game in Indianapolis. That's a nice business to learn about in a Chinese restaurant, with everybody dangling who knows what from chopsticks.

  He said that his workaday problems had as much to do with aesthetics as with toxicity. Those were both his words, "aesthetics" and "toxicity."

  He said, "Nobody likes to find a foot or a finger or whatever in a garbage can or a dump, even though it is no more dangerous to public health than the remains of a rib roast."

  He asked me if I saw anything on his a
nd his wife's table that I would like to sample, that they had ordered too much.

  "No, thank you, sir," I said.

  "But telling you that," he said, "is coals to Newcastle."

  "How so?" I said. I was trying not to listen to him, and was looking in exactly the wrong place for distraction, which was the face of my mother-in-law. Apparently this potential lunatic with no place else to go had become a permanent part of our household. It was a fait accompli.

  "Well--you've been in war," he said. The way he said it, it was clear that he considered the war to have been my war alone "I mean you people must have had to do a certain amount of cleaning up."

  That was when the kid patted my bristles. My brains blew up like a canteen of nitroglycerin.

  MY LAWYER, MUCH encouraged by the 2 lists I am making, and by the fact that I have never masturbated and like to clean house, asked me yesterday why it was that I never swore. He found me washing windows in this library, although nobody had ordered me to do that.

  So I told him my maternal grandfather's idea that obscenity and blasphemy gave most people permission not to listen respectfully to whatever was being said.

  I repeated an old story Grandfather Wills had taught me, which was about a town where a cannon was fired at noon every day. One day the cannoneer was sick at the last minute and was too incapacitated to fire the cannon.

  So at high noon there was silence.

  All the people in the town jumped out of their skins when the sun reached its zenith. They asked each other in astonishment, "Good gravy! What was that?"

  My lawyer wanted to know what that had to do with my not swearing.

  I replied that in an era as foulmouthed as this one, "Good gravy" had the same power to startle as a cannon shot.

  THERE ON HARVARD Square, back in 1975, Sam Wakefield again made himself the helmsman of my destiny. He told me to stay out on the sidewalk, where I felt safe. I was shaking like a leaf. I wanted to bark like a dog.