Slapstick or Lonesome No More!

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Eliza was asked to say why the Chinamen had been so right.

  "What civilized country could be interested in a hell-hole like America," she said, "where everybody takes such lousy care of their own relatives?"

  *

  And then, one day, she and Mushari were seen crossing the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge from Cambridge to Boston on foot. It was a warm and sunny day. Eliza was carrying a parasol. She was wearing the jersey of her football team.

  *

  My God--was that poor girl ever a mess!

  She was so bent over that her face was on level with Mushari's--and Mushari was about the size of Napoleon Bonaparte. She was chain smoking. She was coughing her head off.

  Mushari was wearing a white suit. He carried a cane. He wore a red rose in his lapel.

  And he and his client were soon joined by a friendly crowd, and by newspaper photographers and television crews.

  And mother and I watched them on television--in horror, may I say, for the parade was coming ever closer to my house on Beacon Hill.

  *

  "Oh, Wilbur, Wilbur, Wilbur--" said my mother as we watched, "is that really your sister?"

  I made a bitter joke--without smiling. "Either your only daughter, Mother, or the sort of anteater known as an aardvark," I said.

  23

  MOTHER WAS NOT up to a confrontation with Eliza. She retreated to her suite upstairs. Nor did I want the servants to witness whatever grotesque performance Eliza had in mind--so I sent them to their quarters.

  When the doorbell rang, I myself answered the door.

  I smiled at the aardvark and the cameras and the crowd. "Eliza! Dear sister! What a pleasant surprise. Come in, come in!" I said.

  For form's sake, I made a tentative gesture as though I might touch her. She drew back. "You touch me, Lord Fauntleroy, and I'll bite you, and you'll die of rabies," she said.

  *

  Policemen kept the crowd from following Eliza and Mushari into the house, and I closed the drapes on the windows, so no one could see in.

  When I was sure we had privacy, I said to her bleakly, "What brings you here?"

  "Lust for your perfect body, Wilbur," she said. She coughed and laughed. "Is dear Mater here, or dear Pater?" She corrected herself. "Oh, dear--dear Pater is dead, isn't he? Or is it dear Mater? It's so hard to tell."

  "Mother is in Turtle Bay, Eliza," I lied. Inwardly, I was swooning with sorrow and loathing and guilt. I estimated that her crushed ribcage had the capacity of a box of kitchen matches. The room was beginning to smell like a distillery. Eliza had a problem with alcohol as well. Her skin was bad. She had a complexion like our great-grandmother's steamer trunk.

  "Turtle Bay, Turtle Bay," she mused. "Did it ever occur to you, dear Brother, that dear Father was not our Father at all?"

  "What do you mean?" I said.

  "Perhaps Mother stole from the bed and out of the house on a moonlit night," she said, "and mated with a giant sea turtle in Turtle Bay."

  Hi ho.

  *

  "Eliza," I said, "if we're going to discuss family matters, perhaps Mr. Mushari should leave us alone."

  "Why?" she said. "Normie is the only family I have."

  "Now, now--" I said.

  "That overdressed sparrow-fart of a mother of yours is surely no relative of mine," she said.

  "Now, now--" I said.

  "And you don't consider yourself a relative of mine, do you?" she said.

  "What can I say?" I said.

  "That's why we're visiting you--to hear all the wonderful things you have to say," she said. "You were always the brainy one. I was just some kind of tumor that had to be removed from your side."

  *

  "I never said that," I said.

  "Other people said it, and you believed them," she said. "That's worse. You're a Fascist, Wilbur. That's what you are."

  "That's absurd," I said.

  "Fascists are inferior people who believe it when somebody tells them they're superior," she said.

  "Now, now--" I said.

  "Then they want everybody else to die," she said.

  *

  "This is getting us nowhere," I said.

  "I'm used to getting nowhere," she said, "as you may have read in the papers and seen on television."

  "Eliza--" I said, "would it help at all for you to know that Mother will be sick for the rest of our lives about that awful thing we did to you?"

  "How could that help?" she said. "That's the dumbest question I ever heard."

  *

  She looped a great arm over the shoulders of Norman Mushari, Jr. "Here's who knows how to help people," she said.

  I nodded. "We're grateful to him. We really are."

  "He's my mother and father and brother and God, all wrapped up in one," she said. "He gave me the gift of life!

  "He said to me, 'Money isn't going to make you feel any better, Sweetheart, but we're going to sue the piss out of your relatives anyway.'"

  "Um," I said.

  "But it sure helps a hell of a lot more than your expressions of guilt, I must say. Those are just boasts about your own wonderful sensibilities."

  She laughed unpleasantly. "But I can see where you and Mother might want to boast about your guilt. After all, it's the only thing you two monkeys ever earned."

  Hi ho.

  24

  I ASSUMED THAT ELIZA had now assaulted my self-respect with every weapon she had. I had somehow survived.

  Without pride, with a clinical and cynical sort of interest, I noted that I had a cast-iron character which would repel attacks, apparently, even if I declined to put up defenses of any other kind.

  How wrong I was about Eliza's having expended her fury!

  Her opening attacks had been aimed merely at exposing the cast iron in my character. She had merely sent out light patrols to cut down the trees and shrubs in front of my character, to strip it of its vines, so to speak.

  And now, without my realizing it, the shell of my character stood before her concealed howitzers at nearly point-blank range, as naked and brittle as a Franklin stove.

  Hi ho.

  *

  There was a lull. Eliza prowled about my livingroom, looking at my books, which she couldn't read, of course. Then she returned to me, and she cocked her head, and she said, "People get into Harvard Medical School because they can read and write?"

  "I worked very hard, Eliza," I said. "It wasn't easy for me. It isn't easy now."

  "If Bobby Brown becomes a doctor," she said, "that will be the strongest argument I ever heard for the Christian Scientists."

  "I will not be the best doctor there ever was," I said. "I won't be the worst, either."

  "You might be a very good man with a gong," she said. She was alluding to recent rumors that the Chinese had had remarkable successes in treating breast cancer with the music of ancient gongs. "You look like a man," she said, "who could hit a gong almost every time."

  "Thank you," I said.

  "Touch me," she said.

  "Pardon me?" I said.

  "I'm your own flesh. I'm your sister. Touch me," she said.

  "Yes, of course," I said. But my arms seemed queerly paralyzed.

  *

  "Take your time," she said.

  "Well--" I said, "since you hate me so--"

  "I hate Bobby Brown," she said.

  "Since you hate Bobby Brown--" I said.

  "And Betty Brown," she said.

  "That was so long ago," I said.

  "Touch me," she said.

  "Oh, Christ, Eliza!" I said. My arms still wouldn't move.

  "I'll touch you," she said.

  "Whatever you say," I said. I was scared stiff.

  "You don't have a heart condition, do you Wilbur?" she said.

  "No," I said.

  "If I touch you, you promise you won't die?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "Maybe I'll die," she said.

  "I hope not," I said.

  "Just beca
use I act like I know what's going to happen," she said, "doesn't mean I know what's going to happen. Maybe nothing will happen."

  "Maybe," I said.

  "I've never seen you so frightened," she said.

  "I'm human," I said.

  "You want to tell Normie what you're scared about?" she said.

  "No," I said.

  *

  Eliza, with her fingertips almost brushing my cheek, quoted from a dirty joke Withers Witherspoon had told another servant when we were children. We had heard it through a wall. The joke had to do with a woman who was wildly responsive during sexual intercourse. In the joke, the woman warned a stranger who was beginning to make love to her.

  Eliza passed on the sultry warning to me: "Keep your hat on, Buster. We may wind up miles from here."

  *

  Then she touched me.

  We became a single genius again.

  25

  WE WENT BERSERK. It was only by the Grace of God that we did not tumble out of the house and into the crowd on Beacon Street. Some parts of us, of which I had not been at all aware, of which Eliza had been excruciatingly aware, had been planning a reunion for a long, long time.

  I could no longer tell where I stopped and Eliza began, or where Eliza and I stopped and the Universe began. It was gorgeous and it was horrible. Yes, and let this be a measure of the quantity of energy involved: The orgy went on for five whole nights and days.

  *

  Eliza and I slept for three days after that. When I at last woke up, I found myself in my own bed. I was being fed intravenously.

  Eliza, as I later found out, had been taken to her own home in a private ambulance.

  *

  As for why nobody broke us up or summoned help: Eliza and I captured Norman Mushari, Jr., and poor Mother and the servants--one by one.

  I have no memory of doing this.

  We tied them to wooden chairs and gagged them, apparently, and set them neatly around the diningroom table.

  *

  We gave them food and water, thank Heavens, or we would have been murderers. We would not let them go to the toilet, however, and fed them nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I apparently left the house several times to get more bread and jelly and peanut butter.

  And then the orgy would begin again.

  *

  I remember reading out loud to Eliza from books on pediatrics and child psychology and sociology and anthropology, and so on. I had never thrown away any book from any course I had taken.

  I remember writhing embraces which alternated with periods of my sitting at my typewriter, with Eliza beside me. I was typing something with superhuman speed.

  Hi ho.

  *

  When I came out of my coma, Mushari and my own lawyers had already paid my servants handsomely for the agony they had suffered at the dinner table, and for their silence as to the dreadful things they had seen.

  Mother had been released from Massachusetts General Hospital, and was back in bed in Turtle Bay.

  *

  Physically, I had suffered from exhaustion and nothing more.

  When I was allowed to rise, however, I was so damaged psychologically that I expected to find everything unfamiliar. If gravity had become variable on that day, as it in fact did many years later, if I had had to crawl about my house on my hands and knees, as I often do now, I would have thought it a highly appropriate response by the Universe to all I had been through.

  *

  But little had changed. The house was tidy.

  The books were back in their shelves. A broken thermostat had been replaced. Three diningroom chairs had been sent out for repairs. The diningroom carpet was somewhat piebald, pale spots indicating where stains had been removed.

  The one proof that something extraordinary had happened was itself a paradigm of tidiness. It was a manuscript--on a coffee table in the livingroom, where I had typed so furiously during the nightmare.

  Eliza and I had somehow written a manual on childrearing.

  *

  Was it any good? Not really. It was only good enough to become, after The Bible and The Joy of Cooking, the most popular book of all time.

  Hi ho.

  *

  I found it so helpful when I began to practice pediatrics in Vermont that I had it published under a pseudonym, Dr. Eli W. Rockmell, M.D., a sort of garbling of Eliza's and my names.

  The publisher thought up the title, which was So You Went and Had a Baby.

  *

  During our orgy, though, Eliza and I gave the manuscript a very different title and sort of authorship, which was this:

  THE CRY OF THE NOCTURNAL

  GOATSUCKER

  by

  BETTY AND BOBBY BROWN

  26

  AFTER THE ORGY, mutual terror kept us apart. I was told by our go-between, Norman Mushari, Jr., that Eliza was even more shattered by the orgy than I had been.

  "I almost had to put her away again--" he said, "for good cause this time."

  *

  Machu Picchu, the old Inca capital on the roof of the Andes in Peru, was then becoming a haven for rich people and their parasites, people fleeing social reforms and economic declines, not just in America, but in all parts of the world. There were even some full-sized Chinese there, who had declined to let their children be miniaturized.

  And Eliza moved into a condominium down there, to be as far away as possible from me.

  *

  When Mushari came to my house to tell me about Eliza's prospective move to Peru, a week after the orgy, he confessed that he himself had become severely disoriented while tied to a diningroom chair.

  "You looked more and more like Frankenstein monsters to me," he said. "I became convinced that there was a switch somewhere in the house that controlled you. I even figured out which switch it was. The minute I untied myself, I ran to it and tore it out by the roots."

  It was Mushari who had ripped the thermostat from the wall.

  *

  To demonstrate to me how changed he was, he admitted that he had been wholly motivated by self-interest when he set Eliza free. "I was a bounty-hunter," he said, "finding rich people in mental hospitals who didn't belong there--and setting them free. I left the poor to rot in their dungeons."

  "It was a useful service all the same," I said.

  "Christ, I don't think so," he said. "Practically every sane person I ever got out of a hospital went insane almost immediately afterwards.

  "Suddenly I feel old," he said. "I can't take that any more."

  Hi ho.

  *

  Mushari was so shaken by the orgy, in fact, that he turned Eliza's legal and financial affairs over to the same people that Mother and I used.

  He came to my attention only once more, two years later, about the time I graduated from medical school--at the bottom of my class, by the way. He had patented an invention of his own. There was a photograph of him and a description of his patent on a business page in The New York Times.

  There was a national mania for tap-dancing at the time. Mushari had invented taps which could be glued to the soles of shoes, and then peeled off again. A person could carry the taps in little plastic bags in a pocket or purse, according to Mushari, and put them on only when it was time to tap-dance.

  27

  I NEVER SAW ELIZA'S FACE again after the orgy. I heard her voice only twice more--once when I graduated from medical school, and again when I was President of the United States of America, and she had been dead for a long, long time.

  Hi ho.

  *

  When Mother planned a graduation party for me at the Ritz in Boston, across from the Public Gardens, she and I never dreamed that Eliza would somehow hear of it, and would come all the way from Peru.

  My twin never wrote or telephoned. Rumors about her were as vague as those coming from China. She was drinking too much, we had heard. She had taken up golf.

  *

  I was having a wonderful time at
my party, when a bellboy came to tell me I was wanted outside--not just in the lobby, but in the balmy, moonlit night outdoors. Eliza was the farthest thing from my mind.

  My guess, as I followed the bellboy, was that there was a Rolls-Royce from my mother parked outside.

  I was reassured by the servile manner and uniform of my guide. I was also giddy with champagne. I did not hesitate to follow as he led me across Arlington Street and then into the enchanted forest, into the Public Gardens on the other side.

  He was a fraud. He was not a bellboy at all.

  *

  Deeper and deeper we went into the trees. And in every clearing we came to, I expected to see my Rolls-Royce.

  But he brought me to a statue instead. It depicted an old-fashioned doctor, dressed much as it amused me to dress. He was melancholy but proud. He held a sleeping youth in his arms.

  As the inscription in the moonlight told me, this was a monument to the first use of anaesthetics in surgery in the United States, which took place in Boston.

  *

  I had been aware of a clattering whir somewhere in the city, over Commonwealth Avenue perhaps. But I had not identified it as a hovering helicopter.

  But now the bogus bellhop, who was really an Inca servant of Eliza's, fired a magnesium flare into the air.

  Everything touched by that unnatural dazzle became statuary--lifeless and exemplary, and weighing tons.

  The helicopter materialized directly over us, itself made allegorical, transformed into a terrible mechanical angel by the glare of the flare.

  Eliza was up there with a bullhorn.

  *

  It seemed possible to me that she might shoot me from there, or hit me with a bag of excrement. She had traveled all the way from Peru to deliver one-half of a Shakespearean sonnet.

  "Listen!" she said. "Listen!" she said. And then she said, "Listen!" again.

  The flare was meanwhile dying nearby--its parachute snagged in a treetop.

  Here is what Eliza said to me, and to the neighborhood: "O! how thy worth with manners may I sing,

  "When thou art all the better part of me?

  "What can mine own praise to mine own self bring?

  "And what is't but mine own when I praise thee?

  "Even for this let us divided live,

  "And our dear love lose name of single one,

  "That by this separation I may give

  "That due to thee, which thou deserv'st alone."