Hocus Pocus

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Crazy people lived in there.

  I told him somebody was sick in there, and asked what I could do for him.

  He said he had this big box for me from St. Louis, Missouri.

  I SAID I didn't know anybody in St. Louis, Missouri, and wasn't expecting a big box from anywhere. But he proved to me that it was addressed to me all right, so I said, "OK, let's see it." It turned out to be my old footlocker from Vietnam, which I had left behind when the excrement hit the air-conditioning, when I was ordered to take charge of the evacuation from the roof of the embassy.

  Its arrival was not a complete surprise. Several months earlier I had received a notice of its existence in a huge Army warehouse that was indeed on the edge of St. Louis, where all sorts of unclaimed personal property of soldiers was stored, stuff ditched on battlefields or whatever. Some idiot must have put my footlocker on one of the last American planes to flee Vietnam, thus depriving the enemy of my razor, my toothbrush, my socks and underwear, and, as it happened, the late Jack Patton's final birthday present to me, a copy of Black Garterbelt. A mere 14 years later, the Army said they had it, and asked me if I wanted it. I said, "Yes." A mere 2 years more went by, and then, suddenly, here it was at my doorstep. Some glaciers move faster than that.

  So I had the UPS man help me lug it into the garage. It wasn't very heavy. It was just unwieldy.

  The Mercedes was parked out front. I hadn't noticed yet that kids from the town had cored it again. All 4 tires were flat again.

  COUGH, COUGH.

  THE UPS MAN was really only a boy still. He was so childlike and new to his job that he had to ask me what was inside the box.

  "If the Vietnam War was still going on," I said, "it might have been you in there." I meant he might have wound up in a casket.

  "I don't get it," he said.

  "Never mind," I said. I knocked off the lock and hasp with a hammer. I lifted the lid of what was indeed a sort of casket to me. It contained the remains of the soldier I used to be. On top of everything else, lying flat and face up, was that copy of Black Garterbelt.

  "Wow," said the kid. He was awed by the woman on the magazine cover. He might have been an Astronaut on his first trip in space.

  "Have you ever considered being a soldier?" I asked him. "I think you'd make a good one."

  I NEVER SAW him again. He could have been fired soon after that, and gone looking for work elsewhere. He certainly wasn't going to last long as a UPS man if he was going to hang around like a kid on Christmas morning until he found out what was inside all the different packages.

  I STAYED IN the garage. I didn't want to go into the house. I didn't want to go outdoors again, either. So I sat down on my footlocker and read "The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore" in Black Garterbelt. It was about intelligent threads of energy trillions of lightyears long. They wanted mortal, self-reproducing life forms to spread out through the Universe. So several of them, the Elders in the title, held a meeting by intersecting near a planet called Tralfamadore. The author never said why the Elders thought the spread of life was such a hot idea. I don't blame him. I can't think of any strong arguments in favor of it. To me, wanting every habitable planet to be inhabited is like wanting everybody to have athlete's foot.

  The Elders agreed at the meeting that the only practical way for life to travel great distances through space was in the form of extremely small and durable plants and animals hitching rides on meteors that ricocheted off their planets.

  But no germs tough enough to survive a trip like that had yet evolved anywhere. Life was too easy for them. They were a bunch of creampuffs. Any creature they infected, chemically speaking, was as challenging as so much chicken soup.

  THERE WERE PEOPLE on Earth at the time of the meeting, but they were just more hot slop for the germs to swim in. But they had extra-large brains, and some of them could talk. A few could even read and write! So the Elders focused in on them, and wondered if people's brains might not invent survival tests for germs which were truly horrible.

  They saw in us a potential for chemical evils on a cosmic scale. Nor did we disappoint them.

  WHAT A STORY!

  IT SO HAPPENED, according to this story, that the legend of Adam and Eve was being written down for the first time. A woman was doing it. Until then, that charming bunkum had been passed from generation to generation by word of mouth.

  The Elders let her write down most of the origin myth just the way she had heard it, the way everybody told it, until she got very close to the end. Then they took control of her brain and had her write down something which had never been part of the myth before.

  It was a speech by God to Adam and Eve, supposedly. This was it, and life would become pure hell for microorganisms soon afterward: "Fill the Earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves on the Earth."

  COUGH.

  26

  SO THE PEOPLE on Earth thought they had instructions from the Creator of the Universe Himself to wreck the joint. But they were going at it too slowly to satisfy the Elders, so the Elders put it into the people's heads that they themselves were the life forms that were supposed to spread out through the Universe. This was a preposterous idea, of course. In the words of the nameless author: "How could all that meat, needing so much food and water and oxygen, and with bowel movements so enormous, expect to survive a trip of any distance whatsoever through the limitless void of outer space? It was a miracle that such ravenous and cumbersome giants could make a roundtrip for a 6-pack to the nearest grocery store."

  The Elders, incidentally, had given up on influencing the humanoids of Tralfamadore, who were right below where they were meeting. The Tralfamadorians had senses of humor and so knew themselves for the severely limited lunkers, not to say crazy lunkers, they really were. They were immune to the kilovolts of pride the Elders jazzed their brains with. They laughed right away when the idea popped up in their heads that they were the glory of the Universe, and that they were supposed to colonize other planets with their incomparable magnificence. They knew exactly how clumsy and dumb they were, even though they could talk and some of them could read and write and do math. One author wrote a series of side-splitting satires about Tralfamadorians arriving on other planets with the intention of spreading enlightenment.

  But the people here on Earth, being humorless, found the same idea quite acceptable.

  IT APPEARED TO the Elders that the people here would believe anything about themselves, no matter how preposterous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings' heads that the whole Universe had been created by one big male animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot of less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives of the Creator.

  The people down here just ate that up!

  ANOTHER THING THE Elders liked about Earthlings was that they feared and hated other Earthlings who did not look and talk exactly as they did. They made life a hell for each other as well as for what they called "lower animals." They actually thought of strangers as lower animals. So all the Elders had to do to ensure that germs were going to experience really hard times was to tell us how to make more effective weapons by studying Physics and Chemistry. The Elders lost no time in doing this.

  THEY CAUSED AN apple to fall on the head of Isaac Newton.

  They made young James Watt prick up his ears when his mother's teakettle sang.

  THE ELDERS MADE us think that the Creator on the big throne hated strangers as much as we did, and that we would be doing Him a big favor if we tried to exterminate them by any and all means possible.

  That went over big down here.

  SO IT WASN'T long before we had made the deadliest poisons in the Universe, and were stinking up the air and water and topsoil. In the words of the author, and I wish I knew
his name, "Germs died by the trillions or failed to reproduce because they could no longer cut the mustard."

  But a few survived and even flourished, even though almost all other life forms on Earth perished. And when all other life forms vanished, and this planet became as sterile as the Moon, they hibernated as virtually indestructible spores, capable of waiting as long as necessary for the next lucky hit by a meteor. Thus, at last, did space travel become truly feasible.

  IF YOU STOP to think about it, what the Elders did was based on a sort of trickle-down theory. Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are 2 things people at the top can't stand, they have to be leakage and overflow.

  But the Elders' scheme of having the misery of higher animals trickle down to microorganisms worked like a dream.

  THERE WAS A lot more to the story than that. The author taught me a new term, which was "Finale Rack." This was apparently from the vocabulary of pyrotechnicians, specialists in loud and bright but otherwise harmless nighttime explosions for climaxes of patriotic holidays. A Finale Rack was a piece of milled lumber maybe 3 meters long and 20 centimeters wide and 5 centimeters thick, with all sorts of mortars and rocket launchers nailed to it, linked in series by a single fuse.

  When it seemed that a fireworks show was over, that was when the Master Pyrotechnician lit the fuse of the Finale Rack.

  That is how the author characterized World War II and the few years that followed it. He called it "the Finale Rack of so-called Human Progress."

  IF THE AUTHOR was right that the whole point of life on Earth was to make germs shape up so that they would be ready to ship out when the time came, then even the greatest human being in history, Shakespeare or Mozart or Lincoln or Voltaire or whoever, was nothing more than a Petri dish in the truly Grand Scheme of Things.

  In the story, the Elders of Tralfamadore were indifferent, to say the least, to all the suffering going on. When 6,000 rebellious slaves were crucified on either side of the Appian Way back in good old 71 B.C., the Elders would have been delighted if a crucified person had spit into the face of a Centurion, giving him pneumonia or TB.

  IF I HAD to guess when "The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore" was written, I would have to say, "A long, long time ago, after World War II but before the Korean War, which broke out in 1950, when I was 10." There was no mention of Korea as part of the Finale Rack. There was a lot of talk about making the planet a paradise by killing all the bugs and germs, and generating electricity with atomic energy so cheaply that it wouldn't even be metered, and making it possible for everybody to have an automobile that would make him or her mightier than 200 horses and 3 times faster than a cheetah, and incinerating the other half of the planet in case the people there got the idea that it was their sort of intelligence that was supposed to be exported to the rest of the Universe.

  The story was very likely pirated from some other publication, so the omission of the author's name may have been intentional. What sort of writer, after all, would submit a work of fiction for possible publication in Black Garterbelt?

  I DID NOT realize at the time how much that story affected me. Reading it was simply a way of putting off for just a little while my looking for another job and another place to live at the age of 51, with 2 lunatics in tow. But down deep the story was beginning to work like a buffered analgesic. What a relief it was, somehow, to have somebody else confirm what I had come to suspect toward the end of the Vietnam War, and particularly after I saw the head of a human being pillowed in the spilled guts of a water buffalo on the edge of a Cambodian village, that Humanity is going somewhere really nice was a myth for children under 6 years old, like the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.

  COUGH.

  I'LL TELL YOU one germ that's ready to take off for the belt of Orion or the handle on the Big Dipper or whatever right now, somewhere on Earth, and that's the gonorrhea I brought home from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, back in 1967. For a while there, it looked like I was going to have it for the rest of my life. By now it probably can eat broken glass and razor blades.

  The TB germs which make me cough so much now, though, are pussycats. There are several drugs on the market which they have never learned to handle. The most potent of these was ordered for me weeks ago, and should be arriving from Rochester at any time. If any of my germs are thinking of themselves as space cadets, they can forget it. They aren't going anywhere but down the toilet.

  Bon voyage!

  BUT LISTEN TO this: You know the 2 lists I've been working on, 1 of the women I've made love to, and 1 of the men, women, and children I've killed? It is becoming ever clearer that the lengths of the lists will be virtually identical! What a coincidence! When I started out with my list of lovers, I thought that however many of them there were might serve as my epitaph, a number and nothing more. But by golly if that same number couldn't stand for the people I've killed!

  There's another miracle on the order of Tarkington's students being on vacation during the diphtheria epidemic, and then again during the prison break. How much longer can I go on being an Atheist?

  "There are more things in heaven and earth ..."

  27

  HERE IS HOW I got a job at the prison across the lake on the same day Tarkington College fired me:

  I came out of the garage, having read that germs, not people, were the darlings of the Universe. I got into my Mercedes, intending to go down to the Black Cat Cafe to pick up gossip, if I could, about anybody who was hiring anybody to do practically any kind of work anywhere in this valley. But all 4 tires went bloomp, bloomp, bloomp.

  All 4 tires had been cored by Townies the night before. I got out of the Mercedes and realized that I had to urinate. But I didn't want to do it in my own house. I didn't want to talk to the crazy people in there. How is that for excitement? What germ ever lived a life so rich in challenges and opportunities?

  At least nobody was shooting at me, and I wasn't wanted by the police.

  So I went into the tall weeds of a vacant lot across the street from and below my house, which was built on a slope. I whipped out my ding-dong and found it was aimed down at a beautiful white Italian racing bicycle lying on its side. The bicycle was so full of magic and innocence, hiding there. It might have been a unicorn.

  After urinating elsewhere, I set that perfect artificial animal upright. It was brand-new. It had a seat like a banana. Why had somebody thrown it away? To this day I do not know. Despite our enormous brains and jam-packed libraries, we germ hotels cannot expect to understand absolutely everything. My guess is that some kid from a poor family in the town below came across it while skulking around the campus. He assumed, as would I, that it belonged to some Tarkington student who was superrich, who probably had an expensive car and more beautiful clothes than he could ever wear. So he took it, as would I when my turn came. But he lost his nerve, as I would not, and hid it in the weeds rather than face arrest for grand larceny.

  As I would soon find out the hard way, the bike actually belonged to a poor person, a teenage boy who worked in the stable after school, who had scrimped and saved until he could afford to buy as splendid a bicycle as had ever been seen on the campus of Tarkington.

  TO PLAY WITH my mistaken scenario of the bike's belonging to a rich kid: It seemed possible to me that some rich kid had so many expensive playthings that he couldn't be bothered with taking care of this one. Maybe it wouldn't fit into the trunk of his Ferrari Gran Turismo. You wouldn't believe all the treasures, diamond earrings, Rolex watches, and on and on, that wound up unclaimed in the college's Lost and Found.

  Do I resent rich people? No. The best or worst I can do is notice them. I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money. I would discover this to be the majority
opinion in the prison across the lake as well, although nobody over there had ever heard of George Orwell. Many of the inmates themselves had been poor people with money before they were caught, with the most costly cars and jewelry and watches and clothes. Many, as teenage drug dealers, had no doubt owned bicycles as desirable as the one I found in the weeds in the highlands of Scipio.

  When convicts found out that my car was nothing but a 4-door, 6-cylinder Mercedes, they often scorned or pitied me. It was the same with many of the students at Tarkington. I might as well have owned a battered pickup truck.

  SO I WALKED that bicycle out of the weeds and onto the steep slope of Clinton Street. I wouldn't have to pedal or turn a corner in order to deliver myself to the front door of the Black Cat Cafe. I would have to use the brakes, however, and I tested those. If the brakes didn't work, I would go off the end of the dock of the old barge terminal and, alley-oop, straight into Lake Mohiga.

  I straddled the banana-shaped saddle, which turned out to be surprisingly considerate of my sensitive crotch and hindquarters. Sailing down a hill on that bicycle in the sunshine wasn't anything like being crucified.

  I PARKED THE bike in plain view in front of the Black Cat Cafe, noting several champagne corks on the sidewalk and in the gutter. In Vietnam they would have been cartridge cases. This was where Arthur K. Clarke had formed up his motorcycle gang for its unopposed assault on Tarkington. The troops and their ladies had first drunk champagne. There were also remains of sandwiches, and I stepped on one, which I think was either cucumber or watercress. I scraped it off on the curbing, left it there for germs. I'll tell you this, though: No germ is going to leave the Solar System eating sissy stuff like that.