Hocus Pocus

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Those White people on Hokkaido had sure missed a lot. They were way behind practically everybody. And when the man who wanted to teach shop and I presented ourselves at the gate to the road that led through the National Forest to the prison, the 2 guards on duty there were fresh from Hokkaido. For all the respect our being Whites inspired in them, we might as well have been a couple of drunk and disorderly Arapahos.

  THE MAN WHO wanted to teach shop said his name was John Donner. On the way over he asked me if I had seen him on the Phil Donahue show on TV. That was a 1-hour show every weekday afternoon, which featured a small group of real people, not actors, who had had the same sort of bad thing happen to them, and had triumphed over it or were barely coping or whatever. There were 2 very similar programs in competition with Donahue, and the old novelist Paul Slazinger used to watch all 3 simultaneously, switching back and forth.

  I asked him why he did that. He said he didn't want to miss the moment when, suddenly, there was absolutely nothing left to talk about.

  I TOLD JOHN Donner that, unfortunately, I couldn't watch any of those shows, since I taught Music Appreciation in the afternoon, and then Martial Arts after that. I asked him what his particular Donahue show had been about.

  "People who were raised in foster homes and got beat up all the time," he said.

  I WOULD SEE plenty of Donahue reruns at the prison, but not Donner's. That show would have been coals to Newcastle at Athena, where practically everybody had been beaten regularly and severely when he was a little kid.

  I didn't see Donner on TV over there, but I did see myself a couple of times, or somebody who looked a whole lot like me in the distance, on old footage of the Vietnam War.

  I even yelled 1 time at the prison, "There I am! There I am!"

  Convicts gathered behind me, looking at the TV and saying, "Where? Where? Where?"

  But they were too late. I was gone again.

  Where did I go?

  Here I am.

  31

  JOHN DONNER COULD have been a pathological liar. He could have made that up about being on Donahue. There was something very fishy about him. Then again, he could have been living under the Federal Witness Protection Program, with a new name and a fake biography GRIOTTM had written out for him. Statistically speaking, GRIOTTM would have to put it into a biography every so often, I suppose, that the fictitious subject was on Donahue.

  He claimed that the boy he lived with was his son. But he could have kidnapped that kid whose bike I stole. They had come to town only about 18 months before, and kept to themselves.

  I AM SURE his last name wasn't Donner. I have known several Donners. One was a year behind me at the Academy. Two were unrelated Tarkingtonians. One was a First Sergeant in Vietnam who had his arm blown off by a little boy with a homemade handgrenade. Every one of those Donners knew the story of the infamous Donner Party, which got caught in a blizzard back in 1846 while trying to cross the Sierra Nevada Mountains in wagons to get to California. Their wagons were very likely made right here in Scipio.

  I have just looked up the details in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in Chicago and owned by a mysterious Egyptian arms dealer living in Switzerland. Rule Britannia!

  Those who survived the blizzard did so by becoming cannibals. The final tally, and several women and children were eaten, was 47 survivors out of 87 people who had begun the trip.

  Now there's a subject for Donahue: people who have eaten people.

  People who can eat people are the luckiest people in the world.

  But when I asked the man who claimed his last name was Donner if he was any relation to the man who led the Donner Party, he didn't know what I was talking about.

  WHOEVER HE REALLY was, he and I wound up side by side on a hard bench in the waiting room outside the office of Athena's Warden, Hiroshi Matsumoto.

  While we sat there, incidentally, some supplier to the prison was stealing the bicycle from the back of Donner's pickup truck.

  A mere detail!

  DONNER TOLD THE truth about 1 thing at least. The Warden was ready to interview applicants for a teaching job. But we were the only 2 applicants. Donner said he heard about the job opening on the National Public Radio station in Rochester. That isn't the sort of station people looking for work are likely to listen to. It is much too sophisticated.

  THAT WAS THE only area station I know of, incidentally, which said it was tragic, not funny, what happened to Pamela Ford Hall's 1-woman show in Buffalo.

  THERE WAS A Japanese TV set in front of us. There were Japanese TV sets all over the prison. They were like portholes on an ocean liner. The passengers were in a state of suspended animation until the big ship got where it was going. But anytime they wanted, the passengers could look through a porthole and see the real world out there.

  Life was like an ocean liner to a lot of people who weren't in prison, too, of course. And their TV sets were portholes through which they could look while doing nothing, to see all the World was doing with no help from them.

  Look at it go!

  AT ATHENA, THOUGH, the TVs showed nothing but very old shows from a large library of tapes 2 doors down from the office of Warden Matsumoto's office.

  The tapes weren't played in any particular order. A guard who might not even understand English kept the central VCR stoked with whatever came to hand, just as though the cassettes were charcoal briquettes and the VCR was a hibachi back on Hokkaido.

  But this whole scheme was an American invention taken over by the Japanese, like the VCR and the TV sets. Back when races were mixed in prisons, the adopted son of a member of the Board of Directors of the Museum of Broadcasting was sent to Athena for having strangled a girlfriend behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So the father had hundreds of tapes of TV shows in the library of the Museum of Broadcasting duplicated and presented to the prison. His dream, apparently, was that the tapes would provide the basis for a course at Athena in Broadcasting, which industry some of the inmates might consider entering after they got out, if they ever got out.

  But the course in Broadcasting never materialized. So the tapes were run over and over again as something better than nothing for the convicts to look at while they were serving time.

  THE ADOPTED SON of the donor of the tapes came back into the news briefly at the time the prison populations were being segregated according to race. There was talk of paroling him and a lot of others rather than transferring them to other prisons.

  But the parents of the girl he had murdered behind the museum, who were well connected socially, demanded that he serve his full sentence, which, as I recall it, was 99 years. He was adopted, as I say. It came out that his biological father had also been a murderer.

  So he now may be on one of the aircraft carriers or missile cruisers in New York Harbor that have been converted into prison ships.

  WHILE DONNER AND I waited to see the Warden, we watched the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Bingo! The back of his head flew off. His wife, wearing a pillbox hat, crawled out over the trunk of the convertible limousine.

  And then the show cut to the police station in Dallas as Lee Harvey Oswald, the ex-Marine who supposedly shot the President with a mail-order Italian rifle, was shot in the guts by the owner of a local strip joint. Oswald said, "Ow." There, yet again, was that "Ow" heard round the world.

  Who says history has to be boring?

  MEANWHILE, OUT IN the prison parking lot, somebody who had delivered food or whatever to the prison was taking the bicycle out of Donner's truck and putting it in his own, and taking off. It was like the murder of the Lilac Queen back in 1922, a perfect crime.

  Cough.

  THERE IS EVEN talk now of turning our nuclear submarines into jails for persons who, like myself, are awaiting trial. They wouldn't submerge, of course, and the rocket and torpedo tubes and all the electronic equipment would be sold for junk, leaving more space for cells.

  If the entire submarine fleet were converted into jai
ls, I've heard, the cells would be filled up at once. When this place stopped being a college and became a prison, it was filled to the brim before you could say "Jack Robinson."

  I WAS CALLED into the Warden's Office first. When I came back out, with not only a job but a place to live, the TV set was displaying a program I had watched when I was a boy, Howdy Doody. Buffalo Bob, the host, was about to be sprayed with seltzer water by Clarabell the Clown.

  They were in black and white. That's how old that show was.

  I told Donner the Warden wanted to see him, but he didn't seem to know who I was. I felt as though I were trying to wake up a mean drunk. I used to have to do that a lot in Vietnam. A couple of times the mean drunks were Generals. The worst was a visiting Congressman.

  I thought I might have to fight Donner before he realized that Howdy Doody wasn't the main thing going on.

  WARDEN HIROSHI MATSUMOTO was a survivor of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima, when I was 5 and he was 8. When the bomb was dropped, he was playing soccer during school recess. He chased a ball into a ditch at one end of the playing field. He bent over to pick up the ball. There was a flash and wind. When he straightened up, his city was gone. He was alone on a desert, with little spirals of dust dancing here and there. But I would have to know him for more than 2 years before he told me that.

  His teachers and schoolmates were executed without trial for the crime of Emperor Worship.

  Like St. Joan of Arc, they were burned alive.

  CRUCIFIXION AS A mode of execution for the very worst criminals was outlawed by the first Christian Roman Emperor, who was Constantine the Great.

  Burning and boiling were still OK.

  IF I HAD had more time to think about it, I might not have applied for a job at Athena, realizing that I would have had to admit that I had served in Vietnam, killing or trying to kill nothing but Orientals. And my interviewer would surely be Oriental.

  Yes, and no sooner did Warden Matsumoto hear that I was a West Pointer than he said with terrible heaviness, "Then of course you spent time in Vietnam."

  I thought to myself, "Oh oh. There goes the ball game."

  I misread him completely, not knowing then that the Japanese considered themselves to be as genetically discrete from other Orientals as from me or Donner or Nancy Reagan or the pallid, hairy Ainus, say.

  "A soldier does what he is ordered to do," I said. "I never felt good about what I had to do." This wasn't entirely true. I had gotten high as a kite on the fighting now and then. I actually killed a man with my bare hands 1 time. He had tried to kill me. I barked like a dog and laughed afterward, and then threw up.

  MY CONFESSION THAT I had served in Vietnam, to my amazement, made Warden Matsumoto feel that we were almost brothers! He came out from behind his desk to take me by the hand and stare into my eyes. It was an odd experience for me, simply from the physical standpoint, since he was wearing a surgical mask and rubber gloves.

  "So we both know what it is," he said, "to be shipped to an alien land on a dangerous mission of vainglorious lunacy!"

  32

  WHAT AN AFTERNOON!

  Only 3 hours before, I had been so at peace in my bell tower. Now I was inside a maximum-security prison, with a masked and gloved Japanese national who insisted that the United States was his Vietnam!

  What is more, he had been in the middle of student antiwar protests over here when the Vietnam War was going on. His corporation had sent him to the Harvard Business School to study the minds of the movers and shakers who were screwing up our economy for their own immediate benefit, taking money earmarked for research and development and new machinery and so on, and putting it into monumental retirement plans and year-end bonuses for themselves.

  During our interview, he used all the antiwar rhetoric he had heard at Harvard in the '60s to denounce his own country's overseas disaster. We were a quagmire. There was no light at the end of the tunnel over here, and on and on.

  Until that moment, I had not given a thought to the mental state of members of the ever-growing army of Japanese nationals in this country, who had to make a financial go of all the properties their corporations had bought out from under us. And it really must have felt to most of them like a war overseas about Heaven knows what, and especially since, as was my case in Vietnam, they were color-coded in contrast with the majority of the native population.

  ON THE SUBJECT of color-coding: You might have expected that a lot of black people would be shot after the prison break, even though they weren't escaped convicts. The state of mind of Whites in this valley, certainly, was that any Black male had to be an escapee.

  Shoot first, and ask questions afterward. I sure used to do that.

  But the only person who wasn't an escapee who got shot just for being black was a nephew of the Mayor of Troy. And he was only winged. He lost the use of his right hand, but that has since been repaired by the miracle of microsurgery.

  He was left-handed anyway.

  He was winged when he was where he wasn't supposed to be, where nobody of any race was supposed to be. He was camping in the National Forest, which is against the law. He didn't even know there had been a prison break.

  And then: Bang!

  AND HERE I am capitalizing "Black" and "White" sometimes, and then not capitalizing them, and not feeling right about how the words look either way. That could be because sometimes race seems to matter a tremendous lot, and other times race seems to matter a little less than that. And I keep wanting to say "so-called Black" or "so-called black." My guess is that well over half the inmates at Athena, and now in this prison here, had white or White ancestors. Many appear to be mostly white, but they get no credit for that.

  Imagine what that must feel like.

  I myself have claimed a black ancestor, since this is a prison for Blacks only, and I don't want to be transferred out of here. I need this library. You can imagine what sorts of libraries they must have on the aircraft carriers and missile cruisers which have been converted into prison ships.

  THIS IS HOME.

  MY LAWYER SAYS I am smart not to want to be transferred, but for other reasons. A transfer might put me back in the news again, and raise a popular clamor for my punishment.

  As matters stand now, I am forgotten by the general public, and so, for that matter, is the prison break. The break was big news on TV for only about 10 days.

  And then it was displaced as a headliner by a lone White girl. She was the daughter of a gun nut in rural northern California. She wiped out the Prom Committee of her high school with a Chinese handgrenade from World War II.

  Her father had one of the World's most complete collections of handgrenades.

  NOW HIS COLLECTION isn't as complete as it used to be, unless, of course, he had more than 1 Chinese handgrenade from the Finale Rack.

  WARDEN MATSUMOTO BECAME chattier and chattier during my job interview. Before he was sent to Athena, he said, he ran a hospital-for-profit his corporation had bought in Louisville. He loved the Kentucky Derby. But he hated his job.

  I told him I used to go to the horse races in Saigon every chance I got.

  He said, "I only wish our Chairman of the Board back in Tokyo could have spent just one hour with me in our emergency room, turning away dying people because they could not afford our services."

  "YOU HAD A body count in Vietnam, I believe?" he said.

  It was true. We were ordered to count how many people we killed so that higher headquarters, all the way back to Washington, D.C., could estimate how much closer, even if it was only a teeny-weeny bit closer, all our efforts were bringing us to victory. There wasn't any other way to keep score.

  "So now we count dollars the way you used to count bodies," he said. "What does that bring us closer to? What does it mean? We should do with those dollars what you did with the bodies. Bury and forget them! You were luckier with your bodies than we are with all our dollars."

  "How so?" I said.

  "All anybody can do with bodies is
burn them or bury them," he said. "There isn't any nightmare afterwards, when you have to invest them and make them grow."

  "WHAT A CLEVER trap your Ruling Class set for us," he went on. "First the atomic bomb. Now this."

  "Trap?" I echoed wonderingly.

  "They looted your public and corporate treasuries, and turned your industries over to nincompoops," he said. "Then they had your Government borrow so heavily from us that we had no choice but to send over an Army of Occupation in business suits. Never before has the Ruling Class of a country found a way to stick other countries with all the responsibilities their wealth might imply, and still remain rich beyond the dreams of avarice! No wonder they thought the comatose Ronald Reagan was a great President!"

  HIS POINT WAS well taken, it seems to me.

  When Jason Wilder and all the rest of the Trustees were hostages in the stable, and I paid them a call, I got the distinct impression that they regarded Americans as foreigners. What nationality that made them is hard to say.

  THEY WERE ALL White, and they were all Male, since Lowell Chung's mother had died of tetanus. She died before the doctors could understand what was killing her. None of them had ever seen a case of tetanus before, because practically everybody in this country in the old days had been immunized.

  Now that public health programs have pretty much fallen apart, and no foreigners are interested in running them, which is certainly understandable, quite a number of cases of tetanus, and especially among children, are turning up again.

  So most doctors know what it looks like now. Mrs. Chung had the misfortune to be a pioneer.