Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five

Billy skipped to the end of the book, where the hero mingled with the people who were taking Jesus down from the cross. The time-traveler was the first one up the ladder, dressed in clothes of the period, and he leaned close to Jesus so people couldn’t see him use the stethoscope, and he listened.

There wasn’t a sound inside the emaciated chest cavity. The Son of God was as dead as a doornail.

So it goes.

The time-traveler, whose name was Lance Corwin, also got to measure the length of Jesus, but not to weigh him. Jesus was five feet and three and a half inches long.

Another clerk came up to Billy and asked him if he was going to buy the book or not, and Billy said that he wanted to buy it, please. He had his back to a rack of paperback books about oral-genital contacts from ancient Egypt to the present and so on, and the clerk supposed Billy was reading one of these. So he was startled when he saw what Billy’s book was. He said, “Jesus Christ, where did you find this thing?” and so on, and he had to tell the other clerks about the pervert who wanted to buy the window dressing. The other clerks already knew about Billy. They had been watching him, too.

The cash register where Billy waited for his change was near a bin of old girly magazines. Billy looked at one out of the corner of his eye, and he saw this question on its cover: What really became of Montana Wildhack?

So Billy read it. He knew where Montana Wildhack really was, of course. She was back on Tralfamadore, taking care of the baby, but the magazine, which was called Midnight Pussycats , promised that she was wearing a cement overcoat under fathoms of saltwater in San Pedro Bay.

So it goes.

Billy wanted to laugh. The magazine, which was published for lonesome men to jerk off to, ran the story so it could print pictures taken from blue movies which Montana had made as a teenager. Billy did not look closely at these. They were grainy things, soot and chalk. They could have been anybody.

Billy was again directed to the back of the store and he went this time. A jaded sailor stepped away from a movie machine while the film was still running. Billy looked in, and there was Montana Wildhack alone on a bed, peeling a banana. The picture clicked off. Billy did not want to see what happened next, and a clerk importuned him to come over and see some really hot stuff they kept under the counter for connoisseurs.

Billy was mildly curious as to what could possibly have been kept hidden in such a place. The clerk leered and showed him. It was a photograph of a woman and a Shetland pony. They were attempting to have sexual intercourse between two Doric columns, in front of velvet draperies which were fringed with deedlee-balls.

Billy didn’t get onto television in New York that night, but he did get onto a radio talk show. There was a radio station right next to Billy’s hotel. He saw its call letters over the entrance of an office building, so he went in. He went up to the studio on an automatic elevator, and there were other people up there, waiting to go in. They were literary critics, and they thought Billy was one, too. They were going to discuss whether the novel was dead or not. So it goes.

Billy took his seat with the others around a golden oak table, with a microphone all his own. The master of ceremonies asked him his name and what paper he was from. Billy said he was from the Ilium Gazette .

He was nervous and happy. “If you’re ever in Cody, Wyoming,” he told himself, “just ask for Wild Bob.”

Billy put his hand up at the very first part of the program but he wasn’t called on right away. Others got in ahead of him. One of them said that it would be a nice time to bury the novel, now that a Virginian, one hundred years after Appomattox, had written Uncle Tom’s Cabin . Another one said that people couldn’t read well enough anymore to turn print into exciting situations in their skulls, so that authors had to do what Norman Mailer did, which was to perform in public what he had written. The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modem society, and one critic said, “To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls.” Another one said, “To describe blow-jobs artistically.” Another one said, “To teach wives of junior executives what to buy next and how to act in a French restaurant.”

And then Billy was allowed to speak. Off he went, in that beautifully trained voice of his, telling about the flying saucers and Montana Wildhack and so on.

He was gently expelled from the studio during a commercial. He went back to his hotel room, put a quarter into the Magic Fingers machine connected to his bed, and he went to sleep. He traveled in time back to Tralfamadore.

“Time-traveling again?” said Montana. It was artificial evening in the dome. She was breast-feeding their child.

“Hmm?” said Billy.

“You’ve been time-traveling again. I can always tell.”

“Um.”

“Where did you go this time? It wasn’t the war. I can tell that, too. ”

“ New York.”

“The Big Apple.”

“Hm?”

“That’s what they used to call New York.”

“Oh.”

“You see any plays or movies?”

“No — I walked around Times Square some, bought a book by Kilgore Trout.”

“Lucky you .” She did not share his enthusiasm for Kilgore Trout.

Billy mentioned casually that he had seen part of a blue movie she had made. Her response was no less casual. It was Tralfamadorian and guilt-free:

“Yes—” she said, “and I’ve heard about you in the war, about what a clown you were. And I’ve heard about the high school teacher who was shot. He made a blue movie with a firing squad.” She moved the baby from one breast to the other, because the moment was so structured that she had to do so.

There was a silence.

“They’re playing with the clocks again,” said Montana, rising, preparing to put the baby into its crib. She meant that their keepers were making the electric clocks in the dome go fast, then slow, then fast again., and watching the little Earthling family through peepholes.

There was a silver chain around Montana Wildhack’s neck. Hanging from it, between her breasts, was a locket containing a photograph of her alcoholic mother — grainy thing, soot and chalk. It could have been anybody. Engraved on the outside of the locket were these words:

Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.

And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.

My father died many years ago now — of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.

On Tralfamadore, says Billy Pilgrim, there isn’t much interest in Jesus Christ. The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind, he says, is Charles Darwin — who taught that those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements. So it goes.

The same general idea appears in The Big Board by Kilgore Trout. The flying saucer creatures who capture Trout’s hem ask him about Darwin. They also ask him about golf.

If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still — if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I’m grateful that so many of those moments are nice.