Slapstick or Lonesome No More!

by Kurt Vonnegut

  *

  "And when Eliza and Wilbur die and go to Heaven at last," our father's letter went on, "we can lay them to rest among their Swain ancestors, in the private family cemetery out under the apple trees."

  Hi ho.

  *

  As for who was already buried in that cemetery, which was separated from the mansion by a fence: They were mostly Vermont apple farmers and their mates and offspring, people of no distinction. Many of them were no doubt nearly as illiterate and ignorant as Melody and Isadore.

  That is to say: They were innocent great apes, with limited means for doing mischief, which, in my opinion as an old, old man, is all that human beings were ever meant to be.

  *

  Many of the tombstones in the cemetery had sunk out of sight or capsized. Weather had dimmed the epitaphs of those which still stood.

  But there was one tremendous monument, with thick granite walls, a slate roof, and great doors, which would clearly last past Judgment Day. It was the mausoleum of the founder of the family's fortune and the builder of our mansion, Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.

  *

  Professor Swain was by far the most intelligent of all our known ancestors, I would say--Rockefellers, Du Ponts, Mellons, Vanderbilts, Dodges and all. He took a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the age of eighteen, and went on to set up the Department of Civil Engineering at Cornell University at the age of twenty-two. By that time, he already had several important patents on railroad bridges and safety devices, which alone would soon have made him a millionaire.

  But he was not content. So he created the Swain Bridge Company, which designed and supervised the construction of half the railroad bridges in the entire planet.

  *

  He was a citizen of the world. He spoke many languages, and was the personal friend of many heads of state. But when it came time to build a palace of his own, he placed it among his ignorant ancestors' apple trees.

  And he was the only person who loved that barbarous pile until Eliza and I came along. We were so happy there!

  *

  And Eliza and I shared a secret with Professor Swain, even though he had been dead for half a century. The servants did not know it. Our parents did not know it. And the workmen who refurbished the place never suspected it, apparently, although they must have punched pipes and wires and heating ducts through all sorts of puzzling spaces.

  This was the secret: There was a mansion concealed within the mansion. It could be entered through trap doors and sliding panels. It consisted of secret staircases and listening posts with peepholes, and secret passageways. There were tunnels, too.

  It was actually possible for Eliza and me, for example, to vanish into a huge grandfather clock in the ballroom at the top of the northernmost tower, and to emerge almost a kilometer away--through a trap door in the floor of the mausoleum of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.

  *

  We shared another secret with the Professor, too--which we learned from going through some of his papers in the mansion. His middle name hadn't actually been Roosevelt. He had given himself that middle name in order to seem more aristocratic when he enrolled as a student at M.I.T.

  His name on his baptismal certificate was Elihu Witherspoon Swain.

  It was from his example, I suppose, that Eliza and I got the idea, eventually, of giving simply everybody new middle names.

  4

  WHEN PROFESSOR SWAIN died, he was so fat that I do not see how he could have fitted into any of his secret passageways. They were very narrow. Eliza and I were able to fit into them, however, even when we were two meters tall--because the ceilings were so high--

  Yes, and Professor Swain died of his fatness in the mansion, at a dinner he gave in honor of Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Thomas Alva Edison.

  Those were the days.

  Eliza and I found the menu. It began with turtle soup.

  *

  Our servants would tell each other now and then that the mansion was haunted. They heard sneezing and cackling in the walls, and the creaking of stairways where there were no stairways, and the opening and shutting of doors where there were no doors.

  Hi ho.

  *

  It would be exciting for me to cry out, as a crazed old centenarian in the ruins of Manhattan, that Eliza and I were subjected to acts of unspeakable cruelty in that spooky old house. But we may have in fact been the two happiest children that history has so far known.

  That ecstasy would not end until our fifteenth year.

  Think of that.

  Yes, and when I became a pediatrician, practicing rural medicine in the mansion where I was raised, I often told myself about this childish patient or that one, remembering my own childhood: "This person has just arrived on this planet, knows nothing about it, has no standards by which to judge it. This person does not care what it becomes. It is eager to become absolutely anything it is supposed to be."

  That surely describes the state of mind of Eliza and me, when we were very young. And all the information we received about the planet we were on indicated that idiots were lovely things to be.

  So we cultivated idiocy.

  We refused to speak coherently in public. "Buh," and, "Duh," we said. We drooled and rolled our eyes. We farted and laughed. We ate library paste.

  Hi ho.

  *

  Consider: We were at the center of the lives of those who cared for us. They could be heroically Christian in their own eyes only if Eliza and I remained helpless and vile. If we became openly wise and self-reliant, they would become our drab and inferior assistants. If we became capable of going out into the world, they might lose their apartments, their color televisions, their illusions of being sorts of doctors and nurses, and their high-paying jobs.

  So, from the very first, and without quite knowing what they were doing, I am sure, they begged us a thousand times a day to go on being helpless and vile.

  There was only one small advancement they wished us to make up the ladder of human achievements. They hoped with all their hearts that we would become toilet-trained.

  Again: We were glad to comply.

  *

  But we could secretly read and write English by the time we were four. We could read and write French, German, Italian, Latin and ancient Greek by the time we were seven, and do calculus, too.

  There were thousands of books in the mansion. By the time we were ten, we had read them all by candlelight, at naptime or after bedtime--in secret passageways, or often in the mausoleum of Elihu Roosevelt Swain.

  *

  But we continued to drool and babble and so on, whenever grownups were around. It was fun.

  We did not itch to display our intelligence in public. We did not think of intelligence as being useful or attractive in any way. We thought of it as being simply one more example of our freakishness, like our extra nipples and fingers and toes.

  And we may have been right at that. You know?

  Hi ho.

  5

  AND meanwhile the strange young Dr. Stewart Rawlings Mott weighed us and measured us, and peered into our orifices, and took samples of our urine--day after day after day.

  "How is everybody today?" he would say.

  We would tell him "Bluh" and "Duh," and so on. We called him "Flocka Butt."

  And we ourselves did all we could to make each day exactly like the one before. Whenever "Flocka Butt" congratulated us on our healthy appetites and regular bowel movements, for example, I would invariably stick my thumbs in my ears and waggle my fingers, and Eliza would hoist her skirt and snap the elastic at the waist of her pantyhose.

  Eliza and I believed then what I believe even now: That life can be painless, provided that there is sufficient peacefulness for a dozen or so rituals to be repeated simply endlessly.

  Life, ideally, I think, should be like the Minuet or the Virginia Reel or the Turkey Trot, something easily mastered in a dancing school.

  *

 
I teeter even now between thinking that Dr. Mott loved Eliza and me, and knew how smart we were, and wished to protect us from the cruelties of the outside world, and thinking that he was comatose.

  After Mother died, I discovered that the linen chest at the foot of her bed was crammed with packets of Dr. Mott's bi-weekly reports on the health of Eliza and me. He told of the ever-greater quantities of food being consumed and then excreted. He spoke, too, of our unflagging cheerfulness, and our natural resistance to common diseases of childhood.

  The sorts of things he reported, in fact, were the sorts of things a carpenter's helper would have had no trouble detecting--such as that, at the age of nine, Eliza and I were over two meters tall.

  No matter how large Eliza and I became, though, one figure remained constant in his reports: Our mental age was between two and three.

  Hi ho.

  *

  "Flocka Butt," along with my sister, of course, is one of the few people I am really hungry to see in the afterlife.

  I am dying to ask him what he really thought of us as children--how much he suspected, how much he really knew.

  *

  Eliza and I must have given him thousands of clues as to our intelligence. We weren't the cleverest of deceivers. We were only children, after all.

  It seems probable to me that, when we babbled in his presence, we used words from some foreign language which he could recognize. He may have gone into the library of the mansion, which was of no interest to the servants, and found the books somehow disturbed.

  He may have discovered the secret passageways himself, through some accident. He used to wander around the house a great deal after he was through with us, I know, explaining to the servants that his father was an architect. He may have actually gone into the secret passageways, and found books we were reading in there, and seen that the floors were spattered with candlewax.

  Who knows?

  *

  I would like to know, too, what his secret sorrow was. Eliza and I, when we were young, were so wrapped up in each other that we rarely noticed the emotional condition of anybody else. But we were surely impressed by Dr. Mott's sadness. So it must have been profound.

  *

  I once asked his grandson, the King of Michigan, Stewart Oriole-2 Mott, if he had any idea why Dr. Mott had found life to be such a crushing affair. "Gravity hadn't yet turned mean," I said. "The sky had not yet turned from blue to yellow, never to be blue again. The planet's natural resources had yet to come to an end. The country had not yet been depopulated by Albanian flu and The Green Death.

  "Your grandfather had a nice little car and a nice little house and a nice little practice and a nice little wife and a nice little child," I said to the King. "And yet he used to mope so!"

  My interview with the King took place, incidentally, in his palace on Lake Maxinkuckee, in northern Indiana, where Culver Military Academy had once stood. I was still nominally the President of the United States of America, but I had lost control of everything. There wasn't any Congress any more, or any system of Federal Courts, or any Treasury or Army or any of that.

  There were probably only eight hundred people left in all of Washington, D.C. I was down to one employee when I paid my respects to the King.

  Hi ho.

  *

  He asked me if I regarded him as an enemy, and I said, "Heavens, no, Your Highness--I am delighted that someone of your calibre has brought law and order to the Middle West."

  *

  He grew impatient with me when I pressed him to tell me more about his grandfather, Dr. Mott.

  "Christ," he said, "what American knows anything about his grandparents?"

  *

  He was a skinny and supple and ascetic young soldier-saint in those days. My granddaughter, Melody, would come to know him when he was an obscene voluptuary, a fat old man in robes encrusted with precious stones.

  *

  He was wearing a simple soldier's tunic without any badges of rank when I met him.

  As for my own costume: It was appropriately clownish--a top hat, a claw-hammer coat and striped pants, a pearl-gray vest with matching spats, a soiled white shirt with a choke collar and tie. The belly of my vest was festooned with a gold watch-chain which had belonged to John D. Rockefeller, the ancestor of mine who had founded Standard Oil.

  Dangling from the watch-chain were my Phi Beta Kappa key from Harvard and a miniature plastic daffodil. My middle name had by then been legally changed from Rockefeller to Daffodil-11.

  "There were no murders or embezzlements or suicides or drinking problems or drug problems in Dr. Mott's branch of the family," the King went on, "as far as I know."

  He was thirty. I was seventy-nine.

  "Maybe Grandfather was just one of those people who was born unhappy," he said. "Did you ever think of that?"

  6

  PERHAPS SOME PEOPLE really are born unhappy. I surely hope not.

  Speaking for my sister and myself: We were born with the capacity and the determination to be utterly happy all the time.

  Perhaps even in this we were freaks.

  Hi ho.

  *

  What is happiness?

  In Eliza's and my case, happiness was being perpetually in each other's company, having plenty of servants and good food, living in a peaceful, book-filled mansion on an asteroid covered with apple trees, and growing up as specialized halves of a single brain.

  Although we pawed and embraced each other a great deal, our intentions were purely intellectual. True--Eliza matured sexually at the age of seven. I, however, would not enter puberty until my last year in Harvard Medical School, at the age of twenty-three. Eliza and I used bodily contact only in order to increase the intimacy of our brains.

  Thus did we give birth to a single genius, which died as quickly as we were parted, which was reborn the moment we got together again.

  *

  We became almost cripplingly specialized as halves of that genius, which was the most important individual in our lives, but which we never named.

  When we learned to read and write, for example, it was I who actually did the reading and writing. Eliza remained illiterate until the day she died.

  But it was Eliza who did the great intuitive leaping for us both. It was Eliza who guessed that it would be in our best interests to remain speechless, but to become toilet-trained. It was Eliza who guessed what books were, and what the little marks on the pages might mean.

  It was Eliza who sensed that there was something cockeyed about the dimensions of some of the mansion's rooms and corridors. And it was I who did the methodical work of taking actual measurements, and then probing the paneling and parquetry with screwdrivers and kitchen knives, seeking doors to an alternate universe, which we found.

  Hi ho.

  *

  Yes, I did all the reading. And it seems to me now that there is not a single book published in an Indo-European language before the First World War that I have not read aloud.

  But it was Eliza who did the memorizing, and who told me what we had to learn next. And it was Eliza who could put seemingly unrelated ideas together in order to get a new one. It was Eliza who juxtaposed.

  *

  Much of our information was hopelessly out of date, of course, since few new books had been brought into the mansion since 1912. Much of it, too, was timeless. And much of it was downright silly, such as the dances we learned to do.

  If I wished, I could do a very presentable and historically accurate version of the Tarantella, here in the ruins of New York.

  *

  Were Eliza and I really a genius, when we thought as one?

  I have to say yes, especially in view of the fact that we had no instructors. And I am not boasting when I say so, for I am only half of that fine mind.

  We criticized Darwin's Theory of Evolution, I remember, on the grounds the creatures would become terribly vulnerable while attempting to improve themselves, while developing wings or armorplate, say. T
hey would be eaten up by more practical animals, before their wonderful new features could be refined.

  We made at least one prediction that was so deadly accurate that thinking about it even now leaves me thunderstruck.

  Listen: We began with the mystery of how ancient peoples had erected the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, and the great heads of Easter Island, and the barbaric arches of Stonehenge, without modern power sources and tools.

  We concluded there must have been days of light gravity in olden times, when people could play tiddledy winks with huge chunks of stone.

  We supposed that it might even be abnormal on earth for gravity to be stable for long periods of time. We predicted that at any moment gravity might become as capricious as winds and heat and cold, as blizzards and rainstorms again.

  *

  Yes, and Eliza and I composed a precocious critique of the Constitution of the United States of America, too. We argued that it was as good a scheme for misery as any, since its success in keeping the common people reasonably happy and proud depended on the strength of the people themselves--and yet it described no practical machinery which would tend to make the people, as opposed to their elected representatives, strong.

  We said it was possible that the framers of the Constitution were blind to the beauty of persons who were without great wealth or powerful friends or public office, but who were nonetheless genuinely strong.

  We thought it was more likely, though, that the framers had not noticed that it was natural, and therefore almost inevitable, that human beings in extraordinary and enduring situations should think of themselves as composing new families. Eliza and I pointed out that this happened no less in democracies than in tyrannies, since human beings were the same the wide world over, and civilized only yesterday.

  Elected representatives, hence, could be expected to become members of the famous and powerful family of elected representatives--which would, perfectly naturally, make them wary and squeamish and stingy with respect to all the other sorts of families which, again, perfectly naturally, subdivided mankind.

  Eliza and I, thinking as halves of a single genius, proposed that the Constitution be amended so as to guarantee that every citizen, no matter how humble or crazy or incompetent or deformed, somehow be given membership in some family as covertly xenophobic and crafty as the one their public servants formed.