Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five

Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy one time about a book that wasn’t science fiction. He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov , by Feodor Dostoevsky. “But that isn’t enough any more.” said Rosewater.

Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, “I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living.”

There was a still life on Billy’s bedside table — two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes. Air was trying to get out of that dead water. Bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out.

The cigarettes belonged to Billy’s chain-smoking mother. She had sought the ladies’ room, which was off the ward for WACS and WAVES and SPARS and WAFS who had gone bananas. She would be back at any moment now.

Billy covered his head with his blanket again. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward — always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high-school education.

She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.

Billy heard Eliot Rosewater come in and lie down. Rosewater’s bedsprings talked a lot about that. Rosewater was a big man, but not very powerful. He looked as though he might be made out of nose putty.

And then Billy’s mother came back from the ladies’ room, sat down on a chair between Billy’s and Rosewater’s bed. Rosewater greeted her with melodious warmth, asked how she was today. He seemed delighted to hear that she was fine. He was experimenting with being ardently sympathetic with everybody he met. He thought that might make the world a slightly more pleasant place to live in. He called Billy’s mother ‘dear’. He was experimenting with calling everybody ‘dear’.

“Some day,’ she promised Rosewater, “I’m going to come in here, and Billy is going to uncover his head, and do you know what he’s going to say?”

“What’s he going to say, dear?”

“He’s going to say, “Hello, Mom,” and he’s going to smile. He’s going to say, “Gee, it’s good to see you, Mom. How have you been?”

“Today could be the day.”

“Every night I pray.”

“That’s a good thing to do.”

“People would be surprised if they knew how much in this world was due to prayers.”

“You never said a truer word, dear.”

“Does your mother come to see you often?”

“My mother is dead,” said Rosewater. So it goes.

“I’m sorry.”

“At least she had a happy life as long as it lasted.”

“That’s a consolation, anyway.”

“Yes.”

“Billy’s father is dead, you know, said Billy’s mother. So it goes.

“A boy needs a father.”

And on and on it went — that duet between the dumb, praying lady and the big, hollow man so full of loving echoes.

“He was at the top of his class when this happened,” said Billy’s mother.

“Maybe he was working too hard.” said Rosewater. He held a book he wanted to read, but he was much too polite to read and talk too, easy as it was to give Billy’s mother satisfactory answers. The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension , by Kilgore Trout. It was about people whose mental diseases couldn’t be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension., and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn’t see those causes at all, or even imagine them.

One thing Trout said that Rosewater liked very much was that there really were vampires and werewolves and goblins and angels and so on, but that they were in the fourth dimension. So was William Blake, Rosewater’s favorite poet, according to Trout. So were heaven and hell.

“He’s engaged to a very rich girl,” said Billy’s mother.

“That’s good,” said Rosewater. “Money can be a great comfort sometimes.”

“It really can .”

“Of course it can.”

“It isn’t much fun if you have to pinch every penny till it screams.

“It’s nice to have a little breathing room.”

“Her father owns the optometry school where Billy was going. He also owns six offices around our part of the state. He flies his own plane and has a summer place up on Lake George.”

“That’s a beautiful lake.”

Billy fell asleep under his blanket. When he woke up again, he was tied to the bed in the hospital back in prison. He opened one eye, saw poor old Edgar Derby reading The Red Badge of Courage by candlelight.

Billy closed that one eye, saw in his memory of the future poor old Edgar Derby in front of a firing squad in the ruins of Dresden. There were only four men in that squad. Billy had heard that one man in each firing squad was customarily given a rifle loaded with blank cartridge. Billy didn’t think there would be a blank cartridge issued in a squad that small, in a war that old.

Now the head Englishman came into the hospital to check on Billy. He was an infantry colonel captured at Dunkirk. It was he who had given Billy morphine. There wasn’t a real doctor in the compound, so the doctoring was up to him. “How’s the patient?” he asked Derby.

“Dead to the world.”

“But not actually dead.”

“No.”

“How nice — to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”

Derby now came to lugubrious attention.

“No, no — please — as you were. With only two men for each officer, and all the men sick, I think we can do without the usual pageantry between officers and men.”

Derby remained standing. “You seem older than the rest,” said the colonel.

Derby told him he was forty-five, which was two years older than the colonel. The colonel said that the other Americans had all shaved now, that Billy and Derby were the only two still with beards. And he said, “You know — we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock “My God, my God—” I said to myself. “It’s the Children’s Crusade.”

The colonel asked old Derby how he had been captured, and Derby told a tale of being in a clump of trees with about a hundred other frightened soldiers. The battle had been going on for five days. The hundred had been driven into the trees by tanks.

Derby described the incredible artificial weather that Earthlings sometimes create for other Earthlings when they don’t want those other Earthlings to inhabit Earth any more. Shells were bursting in the treetops with terrific bangs, he said, showering down knives and needles and razorblades. Little lumps of lead in copper jackets were crisscrossing the woods under the shellbursts, zipping along much faster than sound.

A lot of people were being wounded or killed. So it goes.

Then the shelling stopped, and a hidden German with a loudspeaker told the Americans to put their weapons down and come out of the woods with their hands on the top of their heads, or the shelling would start again. It wouldn’t stop until everybody in there was dead.

So the Americans put their weapons down, and they came out of the woods with their hands on top of their heads, because they wanted to go on living, if they possibly could.