Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five

Somewhere a big dog barked.

As Trout lugubriously slung the bag from his shoulder, Billy Pilgrim approached him.

“Mr. Trout—”

“Yes?”

“Are — are you Kilgore Trout?

“Yes.” Trout supposed that Billy had some complaint about the way his newspapers were being delivered. He did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way.

“The — the writer?” said Billy.

“The what?”

Billy was certain that he had made a mistake. “There’s a writer named Kilgore Trout.”

“There is? ” Trout looked foolish and dazed.

“You never heard of him?”

Trout shook his head. “Nobody — nobody ever did.”

Billy helped Trout deliver his papers, driving him from house to house in the Cadillac. Billy was the responsible one, finding the houses, checking them off. Trout’s mind was blown. He had never met a fan before, and Billy was such an avid fan.

Trout told him that he had never seen a book of his advertised, reviewed, or on sale. “All these years” he said, “I’ve been opening the window and making love to the world.”

“You must surely have gotten letters,” said Billy. “I’ve felt like writing you letters many times.”

Trout held up a single finger. “One.”

“Was it enthusiastic? ”

“It was insane . The writer said I should be President of the World.”

It turned out that the person who had written this letter was Elliot Rosewater, Billy’s friend in the veterans’ hospital near Lake Placid. Billy told Trout about Rosewater.

“My God — I thought he was about fourteen years old,” said Trout.

“A full grown man — a captain in the war.”

“He writes like a fourteen-year-old,” said Kilgore Trout.

Billy invited Trout to his eighteenth wedding anniversary which was only two days hence. Now the party was in progress.

Trout was in Billy’s dining room, gobbling canapés. He was talking with a mouthful of Philadelphia cream cheese and salmon roe to an optometrist’s wife. Everybody at the party was associated with optometry in some way, except Trout. And he alone was without glasses. He was making a great hit. Everybody was glad to have a real author at the party, even though they had never read his books.

Trout was talking to a Maggie White, who had given up being a dental assistant to become a homemaker for an optometrist. She was very pretty. The last book she had read was Ivanhoe .

Billy Pilgrim stood nearby, listening. He was palpating something in his pocket. It was a present he was about to give his Wife, a white satin box containing a star sapphire cocktail ring. The ring was worth eight hundred dollars.

The adulation that Trout was receiving, mindless and illiterate as it was, affected Trout like marijuana. He was happy and loud and impudent.

“I’m afraid I don’t read as much as I ought to,” said Maggie.

“We’re all afraid of something,” Trout replied. “I’m afraid of cancer and rats and Doberman pinschers.”

“I should know, but I don’t, so I have to ask,” said Maggie, “what’s the most famous thing you ever wrote?”

“It was about a funeral for a great French chef.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“All the great chefs in the world are there. It’s a beautiful ceremony.” Trout was making this up as he went along. “Just before the casket is closed, the mourners sprinkle parsley and paprika on the deceased.” So it goes.

“Did that really happen? ” said Maggie White. She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. Men looked at her and wanted to fill her up with babies right away. She hadn’t had even one baby yet. She used birth control.

“Of course it happened,” Trout told her. “If I wrote something that hadn’t really happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail. That’s fraud! ”

Maggie believed him. “I’d never thought about that before.”

“Think about it now.”

“It’s like advertising. You have to tell the truth in advertising, or you get in trouble.”

“Exactly. The same body of laws applies.”

“Do you think you might put us in a book sometime?”

“I put everything that happens to me in books.”

“I guess I better be careful what I say.”

“That’s right. And I’m not the only one who’s listening. God is listening, too. And on Judgment Day he’s going to tell you all the things you said and did. If it turns out they’re bad things instead of good things, that’s too bad for you, because you’ll burn forever and ever. The burning never stops hurting.”

Poor Maggie turned gray. She believed that too, and was petrified.

Kilgore Trout laughed uproariously. A salmon egg flew out of his mouth and landed in Maggie’s cleavage.

Now an optometrist called for attention. He proposed a toast to Billy and Valencia, whose anniversary it was. According to plan, the barbershop quartet of optometrists, “The Febs,” sang while people drank and Billy and Valencia put their arms around each other, just glowed. Everybody’s eyes were shining. The song was “That Old Gang of Mine.”

Gee , that song went, but I’d give the world to see that old gang of mine. And so on. A little later it said. So long forever, old fellows and gals, so long forever old sweethearts and pals — God bless ’em — And so on .

Unexpectedly, Billy Pilgrim found himself upset by the song and the occasion. He had never had an old gang, old sweethearts and pals, but he missed one anyway, as the quartet made slow, agonized experiments with chords — chords intentionally sour, sourer still, unbearably sour, and then a chord that was suffocatingly sweet, and then some sour ones again. Billy had powerful psychosomatic responses to the changing chords. His mouth filled with the taste of lemonade, and his face became grotesque, as though he really were being stretched on the torture engine called the rack .

He looked so peculiar that several people commented on it solicitously when the song was done. They thought he might have been having a heart attack, and Billy seemed to confirm this by going to a chair and sitting down haggardly.

There was silence.

“Oh my God,” said Valencia, leaning over him, “Billy — are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“You look so awful.”

“Really — I’m O.K.” And he was, too, except that he could find no explanation for why the song had affected him so grotesquely. He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was.

People drifted away now, seeing the color return to Billy’s cheeks, seeing him smile. Valencia stayed with him, and Kilgore Trout, who had been on the fringe of the crowd, came closer, interested, shrewd.

“You looked as though you’d seen a ghost ,” said Valencia.

“No,” said Billy. He hadn’t seen anything but what was really before him — the faces of the four singers, those four ordinary men, cow-eyed and mindless and anguished as they went from sweetness to sourness to sweetness again.

“Can I make a guess?” said Kilgore Trout. “You saw through a time window .”

“A what?” said Valencia.

“He suddenly saw the past or the future. Am I right?”

“No,” said Billy Pilgrim. He got up, put a hand into his pocket, found the box containing the ring in there. He took out the box, gave it absently to Valencia. He had meant to give it to her at the end of the song, while everybody was watching. Only Kilgore Trout was there to see.