Cat's Cradle: A Novel

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Young Castle smiled wanly, avoiding a direct answer. “He’s a funny person, Father is,” he said. “I think you’ll like him.”

  “I expect to. There aren’t many people who’ve been as unselfish as he has.”

  “One time,” said Castle, “when I was about fifteen, there was a mutiny near here on a Greek ship bound from Hong Kong to Havana with a load of wicker furniture. The mutineers got control of the ship, didn’t know how to run her, and smashed her up on the rocks near “Papa” Monzano’s castle. Everybody drowned but the rats. The rats and the wicker furniture came ashore.”

  That seemed to be the end of the story, but I couldn’t be sure. “So?”

  “So some people got free furniture, and some people got bubonic plague. At Father’s hospital, we had fourteen hundred deaths inside of ten days. Have you ever seen anyone die of bubonic plague?”

  “That unhappiness has not been mine.”

  “The lymph glands in the groin and the armpits swell to the size of grapefruit.”

  “I can well believe it.”

  “After death, the body turns black—coals to Newcastle in the case of San Lorenzo. When the plague was having everything its own way, the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle looked like Auschwitz or Buchenwald. We had stacks of dead so deep and wide that a bulldozer actually stalled trying to shove them toward a common grave. Father worked without sleep for days, worked not only without sleep but without saving many lives, either.”

  Castle’s grisly tale was interrupted by the ringing of my telephone.

  “My God,” said Castle, “I didn’t even know the telephones were connected yet.”

  I picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  It was Major General Franklin Hoenikker who had called me up. He sounded out of breath and scared stiff “Listen! You’ve got to come out to my house right away. We’ve got to have a talk! It could be a very important thing in your life!”

  “Could you give me some idea?”

  “Not on the phone, not on the phone. You come to my house. You come right away! Please!”

  “All right.”

  “I’m not kidding you. This is a really important thing in your life. This is the most important thing ever.” He hung up.

  “What was that all about?” asked Castle.

  “I haven’t got the slightest idea. Frank Hoenikker wants to see me right away.”

  “Take your time. Relax. He’s a moron.”

  “He said it was important.”

  “How does he know what’s important? I could carve a better man out of a banana.”

  “Well, finish your story anyway.”

  “Where was I?”

  “The bubonic plague. The bulldozer was stalled by corpses.”

  “Oh, yes. Anyway, one sleepless night I stayed up with Father while he worked. It was all we could do to find a live patient to treat. In bed after bed after bed we found dead people.

  “And Father started giggling,” Castle continued.

  “He couldn’t stop. He walked out into the night with his flashlight. He was still giggling. He was making the flashlight beam dance over all the dead people stacked outside. He put his hand on my head, and do you know what that marvelous man said to me?” asked Castle.

  “Nope.”

  “ ‘Son,’ my father said to me, ‘someday this will all be yours.’”

  74

  CAT’S CRADLE

  I WENT TO FRANK’S HOUSE in San Lorenzo’s one taxicab.

  We passed through scenes of hideous want. We climbed the slope of Mount McCabe. The air grew cooler. There was mist.

  Frank’s house had once been the home of Nestor Aamons, father of Mona, architect of the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle.

  Aamons had designed it.

  It straddled a waterfall; had a terrace cantilevered out into the mist rising from the fall. It was a cunning lattice of very light steel posts and beams. The interstices of the lattice were variously open, chinked with native stone, glazed, or curtained by sheets of canvas.

  The effect of the house was not so much to enclose as to announce that a man had been whimsically busy there.

  A servant greeted me politely and told me that Frank wasn’t home yet. Frank was expected at any moment. Frank had left orders to the effect that I was to be made happy and comfortable, and that I was to stay for supper and the night. The servant, who introduced himself as Stanley, was the first plump San Lorenzan I had seen.

  Stanley led me to my room; led me around the heart of the house, down a staircase of living stone, a staircase sheltered or exposed by steel-framed rectangles at random. My bed was a foam-rubber slab on a stone shelf, a shelf of living stone. The walls of my chamber were canvas. Stanley demonstrated how I might roll them up or down, as I pleased.

  I asked Stanley if anybody else was home, and he told me that only Newt was. Newt, he said, was out on the cantilevered terrace, painting a picture. Angela, he said, had gone sightseeing to the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle.

  I went out onto the giddy terrace that straddled the waterfall and found little Newt asleep in a yellow butterfly chair.

  The painting on which Newt had been working was set on an easel next to the aluminum railing. The painting was framed in a misty view of sky, sea, and valley.

  Newt’s painting was small and black and warty.

  It consisted of scratches made in a black, gummy impasto. The scratches formed a sort of spider’s web, and I wondered if they might not be the sticky nets of human futility hung up on a moonless night to dry.

  I did not wake up the midget who had made this dreadful thing. I smoked, listening to imagined voices in the water sounds.

  What awakened little Newt was an explosion far away below. It caromed up the valley and went to God. It was a cannon on the water front of Bolivar, Frank’s major-domo told me. It was fired every day at five.

  Little Newt stirred.

  While still half-snoozing, he put his black, painty hands to his mouth and chin, leaving black smears there. He rubbed his eyes and made black smears around them, too.

  “Hello,” he said to me, sleepily.

  “Hello,” I said. “I like your painting.”

  “You see what it is?”

  “I suppose it means something different to everyone who sees it.”

  “It’s a cat’s cradle.”

  “Aha,” I said. “Very good. The scratches are string. Right?”

  “One of the oldest games there is, cat’s cradle. Even the Eskimos know it.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “For maybe a hundred thousand years or more, grownups have been waving tangles of string in their children’s faces.”

  “Um.”

  Newt remained curled in the chair. He held out his painty hands as though a cat’s cradle were strung between them. “No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s …”

  “And?”

  “No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”

  75

  GIVE MY REGARDS TO ALBERT SCHWEITZER

  AND THEN ANGELA HOENIKKER CONNERS, Newt’s beanpole sister, came in with Julian Castle, father of Philip, and founder of the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle. Castle wore a baggy white linen suit and a string tie. He had a scraggly mustache. He was bald. He was scrawny. He was a saint, I think.

  He introduced himself to Newt and to me on the cantilevered terrace. He forestalled all references to his possible saintliness by talking out of the corner of his mouth like a movie gangster.

  “I understand you are a follower of Albert Schweitzer,” I said to him.

  “At a distance….” He gave a criminal sneer. “I’ve never met the gentleman.”

  “He must surely know of your work, just as you know of his.”

  “Maybe and maybe not. You ever see him?”

  “No.”

  “You ever expect to see him?”


  “Someday maybe I will.”

  “Well,” said Julian Castle, “in case you run across Dr. Schweitzer in your travels, you might tell him that he is not my hero.” He lit a big cigar.

  When the cigar was going good and hot he pointed its red end at me. “You can tell him he isn’t my hero,” he said, “but you can also tell him that, thanks to him, Jesus Christ is.”

  “I think he’ll be glad to hear it.”

  “I don’t give a damn if he is or not. This is something between Jesus and me.”

  76

  JULIAN CASTLE AGREES WITH NEWT THAT EVERYTHING IS MEANINGLESS

  JULIAN CASTLE AND ANGELA went to Newt’s painting. Castle made a pinhole of a curled index finger, squinted at the painting through it.

  “What do you think of it?” I asked him.

  “It’s black. What is it—hell?”

  “It means whatever it means,” said Newt.

  “Then it’s hell,” snarled Castle.

  “I was told a moment ago that it was a cat’s cradle,” I said.

  “Inside information always helps,” said Castle.

  “I don’t think it’s very nice,” Angela complained. “I think it’s ugly, but I don’t know anything about modern art. Sometimes I wish Newt would take some lessons, so he could know for sure if he was doing something or not.”

  “Self-taught, are you?” Julian Castle asked Newt.

  “Isn’t everybody?” Newt inquired.

  “Very good answer.” Castle was respectful.

  I undertook to explain the deeper significance of the cat’s cradle, since Newt seemed disinclined to go through that song and dance again.

  “And Castle nodded sagely. “So this is a picture of the meaninglessness of it all! I couldn’t agree more.”

  “Do you really agree?” I asked. “A minute ago you said something about Jesus.”

  “Who?” said Castle.

  “Jesus Christ?”

  “Oh,” said Castle. “Him.” He shrugged. “People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.”

  “I see.” I knew I wasn’t going to have an easy time writing a popular article about him. I was going to have to concentrate on his saintly deeds and ignore entirely the satanic things he thought and said.

  “You may quote me:” he said. “Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing.”

  He leaned down and he shook little Newt’s painty hand. “Right?”

  Newt nodded, seeming to suspect momentarily that the case had been a little overstated. “Right.”

  And then the saint marched to Newt’s painting and took it from its easel. He beamed at us all. “Garbage—like everything else.”

  And he threw the painting off the cantilevered terrace. It sailed out on an updraft, stalled, boomer-anged back, sliced into the waterfall.

  There was nothing little Newt could say.

  Angela spoke first. “You’ve got paint all over your face, honey. Go wash it off.”

  77

  ASPIRIN AND BOKO-MARU

  “TELL ME, DOCTOR,” I said to Julian Castle, “how is ‘Papa’ Monzano?”

  “How would I know?”

  “I thought you’d probably been treating him.”

  “We don’t speak …” Castle smiled. “He doesn’t speak to me, that is. The last thing he said to me, which was about three years ago, was that the only thing that kept me off the hook was my American citizenship.”

  “What have you done to offend him? You come down here and with your own money found a free hospital for his people….”

  “ ‘Papa’ doesn’t like the way we treat the whole patient,” said Castle, “particularly the whole patient when he’s dying. At the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle, we administer the last rites of the Bokononist Church to those who want them.”

  “What are the rites like?”

  “Very simple. They start with a responsive reading. You want to respond?”

  “I’m not that close to death just now, if you don’t mind.”

  He gave me a grisly wink. “You’re wise to be cautious. People taking the last rites have a way of dying on cue. I think we could keep you from going all the way, though, if we didn’t touch feet.”

  “Feet?”

  He told me about the Bokononist attitude relative to feet.

  “That explains something I saw in the hotel.” I told him about the two painters on the window sill.

  “It works, you know,” he said. “People who do that really do feel better about each other and the world.”

  “Um.”

  “Boko-maru.”

  “Sir?”

  “That’s what the foot business is called,” said Castle. “It works. I’m grateful for things that work. Not many things do work, you know.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “I couldn’t possibly run that hospital of mine if it weren’t for aspirin and boko-maru.”

  “I gather,” I said, “that there are still several Bokononists on the island, despite the laws, despite the hy-u-o-ook-kuh….”

  He laughed. “You haven’t caught on, yet?”

  “To what?”

  “Everybody on San Lorenzo is a devout Bokononist, the hy-u-o-ook-kuh notwithstanding.”

  78

  RING OF STEEL

  “WHEN BOKONON AND MCCABE took over this miserable country years ago,” said Julian Castle, “they threw out the priests. And then Bokonon, cynically and playfully, invented a new religion.”

  “I know.” I said.

  “Well, when it became evident that no governmental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.”

  “How did he come to be an outlaw?”

  “It was his own idea. He asked McCabe to outlaw him and his religion, too, in order to give the religious life of the people more zest, more tang. He wrote a little poem about it, incidentally.”

  Castle quoted this poem, which does not appear in The Books of Bokonon:

  So I said good-bye to government,

  And I gave my reason:

  That a really good religion

  Is a form of treason.

  “Bokonon suggested the hook, too, as the proper punishment for Bokononists,” he said. “It was something he’d seen in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s.” He winked ghoulishly. “That was for zest, too.”

  “Did many people die on the hook?”

  “Not at first, not at first. At first it was all make-believe. Rumors were cunningly circulated about executions, but no one really knew anyone who had died that way. McCabe had a good old time making bloodthirsty threats against the Bokononists—which was everybody.

  “And Bokonon went into cozy hiding in the jungle,” Castle continued, “where he wrote and preached all day long and ate good things his disciples brought him.

  “McCabe would organize the unemployed, which was practically everybody, into great Bokonon hunts.

  “About every six months McCabe would announce triumphantly that Bokonon was surrounded by a ring of steel, which was remorselessly closing in.

  “And then the leaders of the remorseless ring would have to report to McCabe, full of chagrin and apoplexy, that Bokonon had done the impossible.

  “He had escaped, had evaporated, had lived to preach another day. Miracle!”

  79

  WHY McCABE’S SOUL GREW COARSE

  “MCCABE AND BOKONON did not succeed in raising what is generally thought of as the standard of living,” said Castle. “The truth was that life was as short and brutish and mean as ever.

  “But people didn’t have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyra
nt in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.”

  “So life became a work of art,” I marveled.

  “Yes. There was only one trouble with it.”

  “Oh?”

  “The drama was very tough on the souls of the two main actors, McCabe and Bokonon. As young men, they had been pretty much alike, had both been half-angel, half-pirate.

  “But the drama demanded that the pirate half of Bokonon and the angel half of McCabe wither away. And McCabe and Bokonon paid a terrible price in agony for the happiness of the people—McCabe knowing the agony of the tyrant and Bokonon knowing the agony of the saint. They both became, for all practical purposes, insane.”

  Castle crooked the index finger of his left hand. “And then, people really did start dying on the hy-u-o-ook-kuh.”

  “But Bokonon was never caught?” I asked.

  “McCabe never went that crazy. He never made a really serious effort to catch Bokonon. It would have been easy to do.”

  “Why didn’t he catch him?”

  “McCabe was always sane enough to realize that without the holy man to war against, he himself would become meaningless. ‘Papa’ Monzano understands that, too.”

  “Do people still die on the hook?”

  “It’s inevitably fatal.”

  “I mean,” I said, “does ‘Papa’ really have people executed that way?”

  “He executes one every two years—-just to keep the pot boiling, so to speak.” He sighed, looking up at the evening sky. “Busy, busy, busy.”

  “Sir?”

  “It’s what we Bokononists say,” he said, “when we feel that a lot of mysterious things are going on.”

  “You?” I was amazed. “A Bokononist, too?”

  He gazed at me levelly. “You, too. You’ll find out.”

  80

  THE WATERFALL STRAINERS

  ANGELA AND NEWT were on the cantilevered terrace with Julian Castle and me. We had cocktails. There was still no word from Frank.