Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five

Now he rolled off his huge wife, whose rapt expression did not change when he departed. He lay with the buttons of his spine along the edge of the mattress, folded his hands behind his head. He was rich now. He had been rewarded for marrying a girl nobody in his right mind would have married. His father-in-law had given him a new Buick Roadmaster, an all-electric home, and had made him manager of his most prosperous office, his Ilium office, where Billy could expect to make at least thirty thousand dollars a year. That was good. His father had been only a barber.

As his mother said, “The Pilgrims are coming up in the world,”

The honeymoon was taking place in the bittersweet mysteries of Indian summer in New England. The lovers’ apartment had one romantic wall which was all French doors. They opened onto a balcony and the oily harbor beyond.

A green and orange dragger, black in the night, grumbled and drummed past their balcony, not thirty feet from their wedding bed. It was going to sea with only its running lights on. Its empty holds were resonant, made the song of the engines rich and loud. The wharf began to sing the same song, and then the honeymooners’ headboard sang, too. And it continued to sing long after the dragger was gone.

“Thank you,” said Valencia at last. The headboard was singing a mosquito song.

“You’re welcome.”

“It was nice.”

“I’m glad.”

Then she began to cry.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m so happy.”

“Good.”

“I never thought anybody would marry me.”

“Um,” said Billy Pilgrim.

I’m going to lose weight for you,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m going to go on a diet. I’m going to become beautiful for you.”

“I like you just the way you are.”

“Do you really? ”

“Really,” said Billy Pilgrim. He had already seen a lot of their marriage, thanks to time-travel, knew that it was going to be at least bearable all the way.

A great motor yacht named the Scheherezade now slid past the marriage bed. The song its engines sang was a very low organ note. All her lights were on.

Two beautiful people, a young man and a young woman in evening clothes, were at the rail in the stern, loving each other and their dreams and the wake. They were honeymooning, too. They were Lance Rumfoord, of Newport, Rhode Island, and his bride, the former Cynthia Landry, who had been a childhood sweetheart of John F. Kennedy in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.

There was a slight coincidence here. Billy Pilgrim would later share a hospital room with Rumfoord’s uncle, Professor Bertram Copeland Rumfoord of Harvard, official Historian of the United States Air Force.

When the beautiful people were past, Valencia questioned her funny-looking husband about war. It was a simple-minded thing for a female Earthling to do, to associate sex and glamor with war.

“Do you ever think about the war?” she said, laying a hand on his thigh.

“Sometimes,” said Billy Pilgrim.

“I look at you sometimes,” said Valencia, “and I get a funny feeling that you’re full of secrets.”

“I’m not,” said Billy. This was a lie, of course. He hadn’t told anybody about all the time traveling he’d done, about Tralfamadore and so on.

“You must have secrets about the war. Or, not secrets, I guess, but things you don’t want to talk about.”

“No.”

“I’m proud you were a soldier. Do you know that?”

“Good.”

“Was it awful?”

“Sometimes.” A crazy thought now occurred to Billy. The truth of it startled him. It would make a good epitaph for Billy Pilgrim — and for me, too.

“Would you talk about the war now, if I wanted you to?” said Valencia. In a tiny cavity in her great body she was assembling the materials for a Green Beret.

“It would sound like a dream,” said Billy. “Other people’s dreams aren’t very interesting usually.”

“I heard you tell Father one time about a German firing squad.” She was referring to the execution of poor old Edgar Derby.

“Um.”

“You had to bury him?”

“Yes.”

Did he see you with your shovels before he was shot?”

“Yes.”

“Did he say anything?”

“No.”

“Was he scared? ”

“They had him doped up. He was sort of glassy-eyed.”

And they pinned a target to him?”

A piece of paper,” said Billy. He got out of bed, said, “Excuse me”, went to the darkness of the bathroom to take a leak. He groped for the light, realized as he felt the rough wall that he had traveled back to 1944, to the prison hospital again.

The candle in the hospital had gone out. Poor old Edgar Derby had fallen asleep on the cot next to Billy’s. Billy was out of bed, groping along a wall, trying to find a way out because he had to take a leak so badly.

He suddenly found a door, which opened, let him reel out into the prison night. Billy was loony with time-travel and morphine. He delivered himself to a barbed-wire fence which snagged him in a dozen places. Billy tried to back away from it but the barbs wouldn’t let go. So Billy did a silly little dance with the fence, taking a step this way, then that way, then returning to the beginning again.

A Russian, himself out in the night to take a leak, saw Billy dancing — from the other side of the fence. He came over to the curious scarecrow, tried to talk with it gently, asked it what country it was from. The scarecrow paid no attention, went on dancing. So the Russian undid the snags one by one, and the scarecrow danced off into the night again without a word of thanks.

The Russian waved to him, and called after him in Russian, “Good-bye.”

Billy took his pecker out, there in the prison night, and peed and peed on the ground. Then he put it away again, more or less, and contemplated a new problem: Where had he come from, and where should he go now?

Somewhere in the night there were cries of grief. With nothing better to do, Billy shuffled in their direction. He wondered what tragedy so many had found to lament out of doors.

Billy was approaching, without knowing it, the back of the latrine. It consisted of a one-rail fence with twelve buckets underneath it. The fence was sheltered on three sides by a screen of scrap lumber and flattened tin cans. The open side faced the black tarpaper wall of the shed where the feast had taken place.

Billy moved along the screen and reached a point where he could see a message freshly painted on the tarpaper wall. The words were written with the same pink paint which had brightened the set for Cinderella . Billy’s perceptions were so unreliable that he saw the words as hanging in air, painted on a transparent curtain, perhaps. And there were lovely silver dots on the curtain, too. These were really nailheads holding the tarpaper to the shed. Billy could not imagine how the curtain was supported in nothingness, and he supposed that the magic curtain and the theatrical grief were part of some religious ceremony he knew nothing about.

Here is what the message said:

Billy looked inside the latrine. The wailing was coming from in there. The place was crammed with Americans who had taken their pants down. The welcome feast had made them as sick as volcanoes. The buckets were full or had been kicked over.

An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, “There they go, there they go.” He meant his brains.