Hocus Pocus

by Kurt Vonnegut

THE HOSTAGES TOLD me about that. One of the first things I said to them was, "Where is Madam Chung?"

  I THOUGHT I should reassure the Trustees after the execution of Lyle Hooper. His corpse had been shown to them as a warning, I suppose, against their making any plans for derring-do. That body was surely icing on the cake of terror, so to speak. The College President, after all, was dangling from spikes in the loft above.

  One of the hostages said in a TV interview after he was liberated that he would never forget the sound of Tex Johnson's head bouncing on the steps as Tex was dragged up to the loft feet first. He tried to imitate the sound. He said, "Bloomp, bloomp, bloomp," the same sound a flat tire makes.

  What a planet!

  THE HOSTAGES EXPRESSED pity for Tex, but none for Lyle Hooper, and none for all the other faculty members and Townies who were also dead. The locals were too insignificant for persons on their social level to think about. I don't fault them for this. I think they were being human.

  The Vietnam War couldn't have gone on as long as it did, certainly, if it hadn't been human nature to regard persons I didn't know and didn't care to know, even if they were in agony, as insignificant. A few human beings have struggled against this most natural of tendencies, and have expressed pity for unhappy strangers. But, as History shows, as History yells: "They have never been numerous!"

  ANOTHER FLAW IN the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

  AND THE WORST flaw is that we're just plain dumb. Admit it!

  You think Auschwitz was intelligent?

  WHEN I TRIED to tell the hostages a little about their captors, about their childhoods and mental illnesses, and their not caring if they lived or died, and what prison was like, and so on, Jason Wilder actually closed his eyes and covered his ears. He was being theatrical rather than practical. He didn't cover his ears so well that he couldn't hear me.

  Others shook their heads and indicated in other ways that such information was not only tiresome but offensive. It was as though we were in a thunderstorm, and I had begun lecturing on the circulation of electrical charges in clouds, and the formation of raindrops, and the paths chosen by lightning strokes, and what thunder was, and on and on. All they wanted to know was when the storm would stop, so they could go on about their business.

  What Warden Matsumoto had said about people like them was accurate. They had managed to convert their wealth, which had originally been in the form of factories or stores or other demanding enterprises, into a form so liquid and abstract, negotiable representations of money on paper, that there were few reminders coming from anywhere that they might be responsible for anyone outside their own circle of friends and relatives.

  THEY DIDN'T RAGE against the convicts. They were mad at the Government for not making sure that escapes from prison were impossible. The more they ran on like that, the clearer it became that it was their Government, not mine or the convicts' or the Townies'. Its first duty, moreover, was to protect them from the lower classes, not only in this country but everywhere.

  Were people on Easy Street ever any different?

  Think again about the crucifixions of Jesus and the 2 thieves, and the 6,000 slaves who followed the gladiator Spartacus.

  COUGH.

  MY BODY, AS I understand it, is attempting to contain the TB germs inside me in little shells it builds around them. The shells are calcium, the most common element in the walls of many prisons, including Athena. This place is ringed by barbed wire. So was Auschwitz.

  If I die of TB, it will be because my body could not build prisons fast enough and strong enough.

  Is there a lesson there? Not a cheerful one.

  IF THE TRUSTEES were bad, the convicts were worse. I would be the last person to say otherwise. They were devastators of their own communities with gunfights and robberies and rapes, and the merchandising of brain-busting chemicals and on and on.

  But at least they saw what they were doing, whereas people like the Trustees had a lot in common with B-52 bombardiers way up in the stratosphere. They seldom saw the devastation they caused as they moved the huge portion of this country's wealth they controlled from here to there.

  UNLIKE MY SOCIALIST grandfather Ben Wills, who was a nobody, I have no reforms to propose. I think any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever the people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.

  WARDEN MATSUMOTO WAS an odd duck. Many of his quirks were no doubt a consequence of his having had an atomic bomb dropped on him in childhood. The buildings and trees and bridges and so on which had seemed so substantial vanished like fantasies.

  As I've said, Hiroshima was suddenly a blank tableland with little dust devils spinning here and there.

  After the flash, little Hiroshi Matsumoto was the only real thing on the table. He began a long, long walk in search of anything else that was also real. When he reached the edge of the city, he found himself among structures and creatures both real and fantastic, living people with their skins hanging on their exposed muscles and bones like draperies, and so on.

  These images about the bombing are all his, by the way. But I wouldn't hear them from him until I had been teaching at the prison and living next door to him by the lake for 2 long years.

  WHATEVER ELSE BEING atom-bombed had done to him, it had not destroyed his conscience. He had hated turning away poor people from the emergency room at the hospital-for-profit he ran in Louisville. After he took over the prison-for-profit at Athena, he thought there ought to be some sort of educational program there, even though his corporation's contract with New York State required him to keep the prisoners from escaping and nothing more.

  HE WORKED FOR Sony. He never worked for anybody but Sony.

  "NEW YORK STATE," he said, "does not believe that education can rehabilitate the sort of criminal who ends up at Athena or Attica or Sing Sing." Attica and Sing Sing were for Hispanics and Whites respectively, who, like the inmates at Athena, had been convicted of at least 1 murder and 2 other violent crimes. The other 2 were likely to be murders, too.

  "I don't believe it, either," he said. "I do know this, though: 10 percent of the people inside these walls still have minds, but there is nothing for those minds to play with. So this place is twice as painful for them as it is for the rest. A good teacher just might be able to give their minds new toys, Math or Astronomy or History, or who knows what, which would make the passage of time just a little bit more bearable. What do you think?"

  "You're the boss," I said.

  HE REALLY WAS the boss, too. He had made such a financial success of Athena that his corporate superiors allowed him to be completely autonomous. They had contracted with the State to take care of prisoners for only 2 thirds as much money per capita as the State had spent when it owned the place. That was about as much as it would have cost to send a convict to medical school or Tarkington. By importing cheap, young, short-term, nonunion labor, and by getting supplies from the lowest bidders rather than from the Mafia and so on, Hiroshi Matsumoto had cut the per capita cost to less than half of what it used to be.

  He didn't miss a trick. When I went to work for him, he had just bought a state-of-the-art crematorium for the prison. Before that, a Mafia-owned crematorium on the outskirts of Rochester, in back of the Meadowdale Cinema Complex, across the highway from the National Guard Armory, had had a monopoly on cremating Athena's unclaimed bodies.

  After the Japanese bought Athena, though, the Mob doubled their prices, using the AIDS epidemic as an excuse. They had to take extra precautions, they said. They wanted double even if the prison provided a doctor's certificate guaranteeing that a body was AIDS-free, and the cause of death, as anybody could see, was some sort of knife or garrote or blunt instrument.

  THERE WASN'T A Japanese manufacturer of crematoria, so Warden Matsumoto bought one from A. J. Topf und Sohn in Essen, Germany. This was the same outfit that had made the ovens for Auschwitz in its heyday.

>   The postwar Topf models all had state-of-the-art smoke scrubbers on their smokestacks, so people in Scipio, unlike the people living near Auschwitz, never knew that they had a busy corpse carbonizer in the neighborhood.

  We could have been gassing and incinerating convicts over there around the clock, and who would know?

  WHO WOULD CARE?

  A WHILE BACK I mentioned that Lowell Chung's mother died of tetanus. I want to say before I forget that tetanus might have a real future in astronautics, since it becomes an extremely rugged spore when life becomes intolerable.

  I HAVEN'T NOMINATED AIDS viruses as promising intergalactic rock jockeys, since, at their present state of development, they can't survive for long outside a living human body.

  Concerted efforts to kill them with new poisons, though, if only partially successful, could change all that.

  THE MAFIA CREMATORIUM behind the Meadowdale Cinema Complex has all this valley's prison business again. Some of the convicts who stayed in or near Athena after the great escape, rather than attack Scipio across the ice, felt that at least they could bust up the A. J. Topf und Sohn crematorium.

  The Meadowdale Cinema Complex itself has gone belly up, since so few people can afford to own an automobile anymore.

  Same thing with the shopping malls.

  ONE THING INTERESTING to me, although I don't know quite what to make of it, is that the Mafia never sells anything to foreigners. While everybody else who has inherited or built a real business can't wait to sell out and take early retirement, the Mafia holds on to everything. Thus does the paving business, for example, remain a strictly American enterprise.

  Same thing with wholesale meat and napkins and tablecloths for restaurants.

  I TOLD THE Warden right up front that I had been canned by Tarkington. I explained that the charges against me for sexual irregularities were a smokescreen. The Trustees were really angry about my having wobbled the students' faith in the intelligence and decency of their country's leadership by telling them the truth about the Vietnam War.

  "Nobody on this side of the lake believes there is such a thing in this miserable country," he said.

  "Such a thing as what, sir?" I said.

  And he said, "Leadership." As for my sexual irregularities, he said, they seemed to be uniformly heterosexual, and there were no women on his side of the lake. He himself was a bachelor, and members of his staff were not allowed to bring their wives with them, if they had them. "So over here," he said, "you would truly be Don Juan in Hell. Do you think that you could stand that?"

  I said I could, so he offered me a job on a trial basis. I would start work as soon as possible, offering general education mostly on the primary-school level, not all that different from what I had done at Tarkington. An immediate problem was housing. His staff lived in barracks in the shadows of the prison walls, and he himself had a renovated house down by the water and was the only inhabitant of the ghost town, a ghost hamlet, actually, after which the prison was named: Athena.

  IF I DIDN'T work out for some reason, he said, he would still need a teacher on the property, who would surely not want to live in the barracks. So he was having another old house in the ghost town made livable, right next to his own. But it wouldn't be ready for occupancy until August. "Do you think the college will let you stay where you are until then, and meanwhile you could commute to work from over there? You have a car?"

  "A Mercedes," I said.

  "Excellent!" he said. "That will give you something in common with the inmates right away."

  "How so?" I said.

  "They're practically all former Mercedes owners," he said. This was only a slight exaggeration. He told the truth when he said, "We have one man in here who bought his first Mercedes when he was 15 years old." That was Alton Darwin, whose dying words on the skating rink after the prison break would be, "See the Nigger fly the airplane."

  SO THE COLLEGE did let us stay in the Scipio house over the summer. There was no summer session at Tarkington. Who would have come to one? And I commuted to the prison every day.

  In the old days, before the Japanese took over Athena, the whole staff was commuters from Scipio and Rochester. They were unionized, and it was their unceasing demands for more and more pay and fringe benefits, including compensation for their travel to and from work, that made the State decide to sell the whole shebang to the Japanese.

  MY SALARY WAS what I had been paid by Tarkington. I could keep our Blue Cross--Blue Shield, since the corporation that owned the prison also owned Blue Cross--Blue Shield. No problem!

  Cough.

  THAT IS ANOTHER thing the prison break cost me: our Blue Cross--Blue Shield.

  33

  IT WOULD WORK out well. When I moved Margaret and Mildred into our new home in the ghost town and pulled down the blinds, it was to them as though we had never left Scipio. There was a surprise present for me on our freshly sodded front lawn, a rowboat. The Warden had found an old boat that had been lying in the weeds behind the ruins of the old Athena Post Office since before I was born, quite possibly. He had had some of his guards fiberglass the outside of it, making it watertight again after all these years.

  It looked a lot like the hide-covered Eskimo umiak that used to be in the rotunda outside the Dean of Women's Office here, with the outlines of the ribs showing through the fiberglass.

  I know what happened to a lot of college property after the prison break, the GRIOTTM and so on, but I haven't a clue what became of that umiak.

  If it hadn't been on display in the rotunda, I and hundreds of Tarkington students and their parents would have gone all the way through life without ever seeing a genuine Eskimo umiak.

  I MADE LOVE to Muriel Peck in that boat. I lay on the bottom, and she sat upright, holding my mother-in-law's fishing rod, pretending to be a perfect lady and all alone.

  That was my idea. What a good sport she was!

  I DON'T KNOW what became of the man who claimed his name was John Donner, who wanted to teach shop at Athena, 8 years before the prison break. I do know that the Warden gave him very short shrift during his job interview, since the last things the prison needed inside its walls were chisels and screwdrivers and hacksaws and band saws and ball-peen hammers and so on.

  I had to wait for Donner outside the Warden's Office. He was my ticket back to civilization, to my home and family and copy of Black Garterbelt. I didn't watch Howdy Doody on the little screen. I interested myself in another person, who was waiting to see the Warden. His color-coding alone would have told me that he was a convict, but he was also wearing leg irons and handcuffs, and was seated quietly on a bench facing mine across the corridor, with a masked and rubber-gloved guard on either side of him.

  He was reading a cheap-looking booklet. Since he was literate, I thought he might be one of the people I was being hired to divert with knowledge. I was right. His name was Abdullah Akbahr. With my encouragement, he would write several interesting short stories. One, I remember, was supposedly the autobiography of a talking deer in the National Forest who has a terrible time finding anything to eat in winter and gets tangled in barbed wire during the summer months, trying to get at the delicious food on farms. He is shot by a hunter. As he dies he wonders why he was born in the first place. The final sentence of the story was the last thing the deer said on Earth. The hunter was close enough to hear it and was amazed. This was it: "What the blankety-blank was that supposed to be all about?"

  THE 3 VIOLENT crimes that had gotten Abdullah into Athena were murders in drug wars. He himself would be shot dead with buckshot and slugs after the prison break, while carrying a flag of truce, by Whitey VanArsdale, the mechanic, and Lyle Hooper, the Fire Chief.

  "Excuse me," I said to him, "but may I ask what you are reading?"

  He displayed the book's cover so I could read it for myself. The title was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

  Cough.

  Abdullah was summoned to the Warden's Office, incidentally, because he
was 1 of several persons, guards as well as convicts, who claimed to have seen a castle flying over the prison. The Warden wanted to find out if some new hallucinatory drug had been smuggled in, or whether the whole place was finally going insane, or what on Earth was happening.

  THE PROTOCOLS OF the Elders of Zion was an anti-Semitic work first published in Russia about 100 years ago. It purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jews from many countries who planned to cooperate internationally so as to cause wars and revolutions and financial busts and so on, which would leave them owning everything. Its title was parodied by the author of the story in Black Garterbelt, and its paranoia, too.

  The great American inventor and industrialist Henry Ford thought it was a genuine document. He had it published in this country back when my father was a boy. Now here was a black convict in irons, who had the gift of literacy, who was taking it seriously. It would turn out that there were 100s of copies circulating in the prison, printed in Libya and passed out by the ruling gang at Athena, the Black Brothers of Islam.

  THAT SUMMER I would start a literacy program in the prison, using people like Abdullah Akbahr as proselytizers for reading and writing, going from cell to cell and offering lessons. Thanks to me, 1,000s of former illiterates would be able to read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by the time of the prison break.

  I denounced that book, but couldn't keep it from circulating. Who was I to oppose the Black Brothers, who regularly exercised what the State would not, which was the death penalty.

  ABDULLAH AKBAHR RATTLED and clinked his fetters. "This any way to treat a veteran?" he said.