Both Angela and Newt, it appeared, were fairly heavy drinkers. Castle told me that his days as a playboy had cost him a kidney, and that he was unhappily compelled, perforce, to stick to ginger ale.
Angela, when she got a few drinks into her, complained of how the world had swindled her father. “He gave so much, and they gave him so little.”
I pressed her for examples of the world’s stinginess and got some exact numbers. “General Forge and Foundry gave him a forty-five-dollar bonus for every patent his work led to,” she said. “That’s the same patent bonus they paid anybody in the company.” She shook her head mournfully. “Forty-five dollars—and just think what some of those patents were for!”
“Um,” I said. “I assume he got a salary, too.”
“The most he ever made was twenty-eight thousand dollars a year.”
“I’d say that was pretty good.”
She got very huffy. “You know what movie stars make?”
“A lot, sometimes.”
“You know Dr. Breed made ten thousand more dollars a year than Father did?”
“That was certainly an injustice.”
“I’m sick of injustice.”
She was so shrilly exercised that I changed the subject. I asked Julian Castle what he thought had become of the painting he had thrown down the waterfall.
“There’s a little village at the bottom,” he told me. “Five or ten shacks, I’d say. It’s ‘Papa’ Monzano’s birthplace, incidentally. The waterfall ends in a big stone bowl there.
“The villagers have a net made out of chicken wire stretched across a notch in the bowl. Water spills out through the notch into a stream.”
“And Newt’s painting is in the net now, you think?” I asked.
“This is a poor country—in case you haven’t noticed,” said Castle. “Nothing stays in the net very long. I imagine Newt’s painting is being dried in the sun by now, along with the butt of my cigar. Four square feet of gummy canvas, the four milled and mitered sticks of the stretcher, some tacks, too, and a cigar. All in all, a pretty nice catch for some poor, poor man.”
“I could just scream sometimes,” said Angela, “when I think about how much some people get paid and how little they paid Father—and how much he gave.” She was on the edge of a crying jag.
“Don’t cry,” Newt begged her gently.
“Sometimes I can’t help it,” she said.
“Go get your clarinet,” urged Newt. “That always helps.”
I thought at first that this was a fairly comical suggestion. But then, from Angela’s reaction, I learned that the suggestion was serious and practical.
“When I get this way,” she said to Castle and me, “sometimes it’s the only thing that helps.”
But she was too shy to get her clarinet right away. We had to keep begging her to play, and she had to have two more drinks.
“She’s really just wonderful,” little Newt promised.
“I’d love to hear you play,” said Castle.
“All right,” said Angela finally as she rose unsteadily. “All right—I will.”
When she was out of earshot, Newt apologized for her. “She’s had a tough time. She needs a rest.”
“She’s been sick?” I asked.
“Her husband is mean as hell to her,” said Newt. He showed us that he hated Angela’s handsome young husband, the extremely successful Harrison C. Conners, President of FabriTek. “He hardly ever comes home—and, when he does, he’s drunk and generally covered with lipstick.”
“From the way she talked,” I said, “I thought it was a very happy marriage.”
Little Newt held his hands six inches apart and he spread his fingers. “See the cat? See the cradle?”
81
A WHITE BRIDE FOR THE SON OF A PULLMAN PORTER
I DID NOT KNOW what was going to come from Angela’s clarinet. No one could have imagined what was going to come from there.
I expected something pathological, but I did not expect the depth, the violence, and the almost intolerable beauty of the disease.
Angela moistened and warmed the mouthpiece, but did not blow a single preliminary note. Her eyes glazed over, and her long, bony fingers twittered idly over the noiseless keys.
I waited anxiously, and I remembered what Marvin Breed had told me—that Angela’s one escape from her bleak life with her father was to her room, where she would lock the door and play along with phonograph records.
Newt now put a long-playing record on the large phonograph in the room off the terrace. He came back with the record’s slipcase, which he handed to me.
The record was called Cat House Piano. It was of unaccompanied piano by Meade Lux Lewis.
Since Angela, in order to deepen her trance, let Lewis play his first number without joining him, I read some of what the jacket said about Lewis.
“Born in Louisville, Ky., in 1905,” I read, “Mr. Lewis didn’t turn to music until he had passed his 16th birthday and then the instrument provided by his father was the violin. A year later young Lewis chanced to hear Jimmy Yancey play the piano. ‘This,’ as Lewis recalls, ‘was the real thing.’ Soon,” I read, ’Lewis was teaching himself to play the boogie-woogie piano, absorbing all that was possible from the older Yancey, who remained until his death a close friend and idol to Mr. Lewis. Since his father was a Pullman porter,” I read, “the Lewis family lived near the railroad. The rhythm of the trains soon became a natural pattern to young Lewis and he composed the boogie-woogie solo, now a classic of its kind, which became known as ‘Honky Tonk Train Blues.’”
I looked up from my reading. The first number on the record was done. The phonograph needle was now scratching its slow way across the void to the second. The second number, I learned from the jacket, was “Dragon Blues.”
Meade Lux Lewis played four bars alone—and then Angela Hoenikker joined in.
Her eyes were closed.
I was flabbergasted.
She was great.
She improvised around the music of the Pullman porter’s son; went from liquid lyricism to rasping lechery to the shrill skittishness of a frightened child, to a heroin nightmare.
Her glissandi spoke of heaven and hell and all that lay between.
Such music from such a woman could only be a case of schizophrenia or demonic possession.
My hair stood on end, as though Angela were rolling on the floor, foaming at the mouth, and babbling fluent Babylonian.
When the music was done, I shrieked at Julian Castle, who was transfixed, too, “My God—life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?”
“Don’t try,” he said. “Just pretend you understand.”
“That’s—that’s very good advice,” I went limp.
Castle quoted another poem:
Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?”
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.
“What’s that from?” I asked.
“What could it possibly be from but The Books of Bokonon?”
“I’d love to see a copy sometime.”
“Copies are hard to come by,” said Castle. “They aren’t printed. They’re made by hand. And, of course, there is no such thing as a completed copy, since Bokonon is adding things every day.”
Little Newt snorted. “Religion!”
“Beg your pardon?” Castle said.
“See the cat?” asked Newt. “See the cradle?”
82
ZAH-MAH-KI-BO
MAJOR GENERAL FRANKLIN HOENIKKER didn’t appear for supper.
He telephoned, and insisted on talking to me and to no one else. He told me that he was keeping a vigil by “Papa’s” bed; that “Papa” was dying in great pain. Frank sounded scared and lonely.
“Look,” I said, “why don’t I go back to my hotel, and you and I can get together later, when this
crisis is over.”
“No, no, no. You stay right there! I want you to be where I can get hold of you right away!” He was panicky about my slipping out of his grasp. Since I couldn’t account for his interest in me, I began to feel panic, too.
“Could you give me some idea what you want to see me about?” I asked.
“Not over the telephone.”
“Something about your father?”
“Something about yow.”
“Something I’ve done?”
“Something you’re going to do.”
I heard a chicken clucking in the background of Frank’s end of the line. I heard a door open, and xylophone music came from some chamber. The music was again “When Day Is Done.” And then the door was closed, and I couldn’t hear the music any more.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d give me some small hint of what you expect me to do—so I can sort of get set,” I said.
“Zah-mah-ki-bo. ”
“What?”
“It’s a Bokononist word.”
“I don’t know any Bokononist words.”
“Julian Castle’s there?”
“Yes.”
“Ask him,” said Frank. “I’ve got to go now.” He hung up.
So I asked Julian Castle what zah-mah-ki-bo meant.
“You want a simple answer or a whole answer?”
“Let’s start with a simple one.”
“Fate—inevitable destiny.”
83
DR. SCHLICHTER VON KOENIGSWALD APPROACHES THE BREAK-EVEN POINT
“CANCER,” said Julian Castle at dinner, when I told him that “Papa” was dying in pain.
“Cancer of what?”
“Cancer of about everything. You say he collapsed on the reviewing stand today?”
“He sure did,” said Angela.
“That was the effect of drugs,” Castle declared. “He’s at the point now where drugs and pain just about balance out. More drugs would kill him.”
“I’d kill myself, I think,” murmured Newt. He was sitting on a sort of folding high chair he took with him when he went visiting. It was made of aluminum tubing and canvas. “It beats sitting on a dictionary, an atlas, and a telephone book,” he’d said when he erected it.
“That’s what Corporal McCabe did, of course,” said Castle. “He named his major-domo as his successor, then he shot himself.”
“Cancer, too?” I asked.
“I can’t be sure; I don’t think so, though. Unrelieved villainy just wore him out, is my guess. That was all before my time.”
“This certainly is a cheerful conversation,” said Angela.
“I think everybody would agree that these are cheerful times,” said Castle.
“Well,” I said to him, “I’d think you would have more reasons for being cheerful than most, doing what you are doing with your life.”
“I once had a yacht, too, you know.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Having a yacht is a reason for being more cheerful than most, too.”
“If you aren’t “Papa’s” doctor,” I said, “who is?”
“One of my staff, a Dr. Schlichter von Koenigswald.”
“A German?”
“Vaguely. He was in the S.S. for fourteen years. He was a camp physician at Auschwitz for six of those years.”
“Doing penance at the House of Hope and Mercy is he?”
“Yes,” said Castle, “and making great strides, too, saving lives right and left.”
“Good for him.”
“Yes. If he keeps going at his present rate, working night and day, the number of people he’s saved will equal the number of people he let die—in the year 3010.”
So there’s another member of my karass: Dr. Schlichter von Koenigswald.
84
BLACKOUT
THREE HOURS AFTER SUPPER Frank still hadn’t come home. Julian Castle excused himself and went back to the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle.
Angela and Newt and I sat on the cantilevered terrace. The lights of Bolivar were lovely below us. There was a great, illuminated cross on top of the administration building of Monzano Airport. It was motor-driven, turning slowly, boxing the compass with electric piety.
There were other bright places on the island, too, to the north of us. Mountains prevented our seeing them directly, but we could see in the sky their balloons of light. I asked Stanley, Frank Hoenikker’s major-domo, to identify for me the sources of the auroras.
He pointed them out, counterclockwise. “House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle, ‘Papa’s’ palace, and Fort Jesus.”
“Fort Jesus?”
“The training camp for our soldiers.”
“It’s named after Jesus Christ?”
“Sure. Why not?”
There was a new balloon of light growing quickly to the north. Before I could ask what it was, it revealed itself as headlights topping a ridge. The headlights were coming toward us. They belonged to a convoy.
The convoy was composed of five American-made army trucks. Machine gunners manned ring mounts on the tops of the cabs.
The convoy stopped in Frank’s driveway. Soldiers dismounted at once. They set to work on the grounds, digging foxholes and machine-gun pits. I went out with Frank’s major-domo to ask the officer in charge what was going on.
“We have been ordered to protect the next President of San Lorenzo,” said the officer in island dialect.
“He isn’t here now,” I informed him.
“I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “My orders are to dig in here. That’s all I know.”
I told Angela and Newt about it.
“Do you think there’s any real danger?” Angela asked me.
“I’m a stranger here myself,” I said.
At that moment there was a power failure. Every electric light in San Lorenzo went out.
85
A PACK OF FOMA
FRANK’S SERVANTS brought us gasoline lanterns; told us that power failures were common in San Lorenzo, that there was no cause for alarm. I found that disquiet was hard for me to set aside, however, since Frank had spoken of my zah-mah-ki-bo.
He had made me feel as though my own free will were as irrelevant as the free will of a piggy-wig arriving at the Chicago stockyards.
I remembered again the stone angel in Ilium.
And I listened to the soldiers outside—to their clinking, chunking, murmuring labors.
I was unable to concentrate on the conversation of Angela and Newt, though they got onto a fairly interesting subject. They told me that their father had had an identical twin. They had never met him. His name was Rudolph. The last they had heard of him, he was a music-box manufacturer in Zurich, Switzerland.
“Father hardly ever mentioned him,” said Angela.
“Father hardly ever mentioned anybody,” Newt declared.
There was a sister of the old man, too, they told me. Her name was Celia. She raised giant schnauzers on Shelter Island, New York.
“She always sends a Christmas card,” said Angela.
“With a picture of a giant schnauzer on it,” said little Newt.
“It sure is funny how different people in different families turn out,” Angela observed.
“That’s very true and well said,” I agreed. I excused myself from the glittering company, and I asked Stanley, the major-domo, if there happened to be a copy of The Books of Bokonon about the house.
Stanley pretended not to know what I was talking about. And then he grumbled that The Books of Bokonon were filth. And then he insisted that anyone who read them should die on the hook. And then he brought me a copy from Frank’s bedside table.
It was a heavy thing, about the size of an unabridged dictionary. It was written by hand. I trundled it off to my bedroom, to my slab of rubber on living rock.
There was no index, so my search for the implications of zah-mah-ki-bo was difficult; was, in fact, fruitless that night.
I learned
some things, but they were scarcely helpful. I learned of the Bokononist cosmogony, for instance, wherein Borasisi, the sun, held Pabu, the moon, in his arms, and hoped that Pabu would bear him a fiery child.
But poor Pabu gave birth to children that were cold, that did not burn; and Borasisi threw them away in disgust. These were the planets, who circled their terrible father at a safe distance.
Then poor Pabu herself was cast away, and she went to live with her favorite child, which was Earth. Earth was Pabu’s favorite because it had people on it; and the people looked up at her and loved her and sympathized.
And what opinion did Bokonon hold of his own cosmogony?
“Foma! Lies!” he wrote. “A pack of foma!”
86
TWO LITTLE JUGS
IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE that I slept at all, but I must have—for, otherwise, how could I have found myself awakened by a series of bangs and a flood of light?
I rolled out of bed at the first bang and ran to the heart of the house in the brainless ecstasy of a volunteer fireman.
I found myself rushing headlong at Newt and Angela, who were fleeing from beds of their own.
We all stopped short, sheepishly analyzing the nightmarish sounds around us, sorting them out as coming from a radio, from an electric dishwasher, from a pump—all restored to noisy life by the return of electric power.
The three of us awakened enough to realize that there was humor in our situation, that we had reacted in amusingly human ways to a situation that seemed mortal but wasn’t. And, to demonstrate my mastery over my illusory fate, I turned the radio off.
We all chuckled.
And we all vied, in saving face, to be the greatest student of human nature, the person with the quickest sense of humor.
Newt was the quickest; he pointed out to me that I had my passport and my billfold and my wristwatch in my hands. I had no idea what I’d grabbed in the face of death—didn’t know I’d grabbed anything.
I countered hilariously by asking Angela and Newt why it was that they both carried little Thermos jugs, identical red-and-gray jugs capable of holding about three cups of coffee.
Cat's Cradle: A Novel Page 12