Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five

Billy traveled in time back to the veterans’ hospital again. The blanket was over his head. It was quiet outside the blanket. “Is my mother gone?” said Billy.

“Yes.”

Billy peeked out from under his blanket. His fiancée was out there now, sitting on the visitor’s chair. Her name was Valencia Merble. Valencia was the daughter of the owner of the Ilium School of Optometry. She was rich. She was as big as a house because she couldn’t stop eating. She was eating now. She was eating a Three Musketeers Candy Bar. She was wearing trifocal lenses in harlequin frames, and the frames were trimmed with rhinestones. The glitter of the rhinestones was answered by the glitter of the diamond in her engagement ring. The diamond was insured for eighteen hundred dollars. Billy had found that diamond in Germany. It was booty of war.

Billy didn’t want to marry ugly Valencia. She was one of the symptoms of his disease. He knew he was going crazy, when he heard himself proposing marriage to her, when he begged her to take the diamond ring and be his companion for life.

Billy said, “Hello” to her, and she asked him if he wanted some candy, and he said, “No, thanks.”

She asked him how he was, and he said, “Much better, thanks.” She said that everybody at the Optometry School was sorry he was sick and hoped he would be well soon, and Billy said, “When you see ’em, tell ’em, ‘Hello.’ ”

She promised she would.

She asked him if there was anything she could bring him from the outside, and he said, “No. I have just about everything I want.”

“What about books?” said Valencia.

“I’m right next to one of the biggest private libraries in the world,” said Billy, meaning Eliot Rosewater’s collection of science fiction.

Rosewater was on the next bed, reading, and Billy drew him into the conversation, asked him what he was reading this time.

So Rosewater told him. It was The Gospel from Outer Space , by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.

But the Gospels actually taught this:

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn ’ t well connected . So it goes.

The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:

Oh, boy — they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!

And that thought had a brother: “ There are right people to lynch .” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.

So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.

And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!

Billy’s fiancée had finished her Three Musketeers Candy Bar. Now she was eating a Milky Way.

“Forget books,” said Rosewater, throwing that particular book under his bed. “The hell with ’em.”

“That sounded like an interesting one,” said Valencia.

“Jesus — if Kilgore Trout could only write! ” Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout’s unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.

“I don’t think Trout has ever been out of the country,” Rosewater went on. “My God — he writes about Earthlings all the time, and they’re all Americans. Practically nobody on is an American.”

“Where does he live?” Valencia asked.

“Nobody knows,” Rosewater replied. “I’m the only person who ever heard of him, as far as I can tell. No two books have the same publisher, and every time I write him in care of a publisher, the letter comes back because the publisher has failed.”

He changed the subject now, congratulated Valencia on her engagement ring.

“Thank you,” she said, and held it out so Rosewater could get a close look. “Billy got that diamond in the war.”

“That’s the attractive thing about war,” said Rosewater. Absolutely everybody gets a little something.”

With regard to the whereabouts of Kilgore Trout: he actually lived in Ilium, Billy’s hometown, friendless and despised. Billy would meet him by and by.

“Billy—” said Valencia Merble.

“Hm?”

“You want to talk about our silver pattern? ”

“Sure.”

“I’ve got it narrowed down pretty much to either Royal Danish or Rambler Rose.”

“Rambler Rose,” said Billy.

“It isn’t something we should rush into,” she said. “I mean — whatever we decide on, that’s what we’re going to have to live with the rest of our lives.”

Billy studied the pictures. “Royal Danish.” he said at last.

“Colonial Moonlight is nice, too.”

“Yes, it is,” said Billy Pilgrim.

And Billy traveled in time to the zoo on Tralfamadore. He was forty-four years old, on display under a geodesic dome. He was reclining on the lounge chair which had been his cradle during his trip through space. He was naked. The Tralfamadorians were interested in his body — all of it. There were thousands of them outside, holding up their little hands so that their eyes could see him. Billy had been on Tralfamadore for six Earthling months now. He was used to the crowd.

Escape was out of the question. The atmosphere outside the dome was cyanide, and Earth was 446,120,000,000,000,000 miles away.

Billy was displayed there in the zoo in a simulated Earthling habitat. Most of the furnishings had been stolen from the Sears Roebuck warehouse in Iowa City, Iowa. There was a color television set and a couch that could be converted into a bed. There were end tables with lamps and ashtrays on them by the couch. There was a home bar and two stools. There was a little pool table. There was wall-to-wall carpeting in federal gold, except in the kitchen and bathroom areas and over the iron manhole cover in the center of the floor. There were magazines arranged in a fan on the coffee table in front of the couch.

There was a stereophonic phonograph. The phonograph worked. The television didn’t. There was a picture of one cowboy pasted to the television tube. So it goes.

There were no wall in the dome, nor place for Billy to hide. The mint green bathroom fixtures were right out in the open. Billy got off his lounge chair now, went into the bathroom and took a leak. The crowd went wild.

Billy brushed his teeth on Tralfamadore, put in his partial denture, and went into his kitchen. His bottled-gas range and his refrigerator and his dishwasher were mint green, too. There was a picture painted on the door of the refrigerator. The refrigerator had come that way. It was a picture of a Gay Nineties couple on a bicycle built for two.