Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

There, he built another schooner, which he called the Lady’s Slipper II .

And he sailed her about the Caribbean, an idler, still seeking the storm that would drive him ashore on what was unmistakably his destiny.

In 1922, he sought shelter from a hurricane in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, which country was then occupied by United States Marines.

Johnson was approached there by a brilliant, self-educated, idealistic Marine deserter named Earl McCabe. McCabe was a corporal. He had just stolen his company’s recreation fund. He offered Johnson five hundred dollars for transportation to Miami.

The two set sail for Miami.

But a gale hounded the schooner onto the rocks of San Lorenzo. The boat went down. Johnson and McCabe, absolutely naked, managed to swim ashore. As Bokonon himself reports the adventure:

He was enchanted by the mystery of coming ashore naked on an unfamiliar island. He resolved to let the adventure run its full course, resolved to see just how far a man might go, emerging naked from salt water.

It was a rebirth for him:

How he came by the name of Bokonon was very simple. “Bokonon” was the pronunciation given the name Johnson in the island’s English dialect.

As for that dialect…

The dialect of San Lorenzo is both easy to understand and difficult to write down. I say it is easy to understand, but I speak only for myself. Others have found it as incomprehensible as Basque, so my understanding of it may be telepathic.

Philip Castle, in his book, gave a phonetic demonstration of the dialect and caught its flavor very well. He chose for his sample the San Lorenzan version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

In American English, one version of that immortal poem goes like this:

In San Lorenzan dialect, according to Castle, the same poem went like this:

Shortly after Johnson became Bokonon, incidentally, the lifeboat of his shattered ship was found on shore. That boat was later painted gold and made the bed of the island’s chief executive.

“There is a legend, made up by Bokonon,” Philip Castle wrote in his book, “that the golden boat will sail again when the end of the world is near.”

My reading of the life of Bokonon was interrupted by H. Lowe Crosby’s wife, Hazel. She was standing in the aisle next to me. “You’ll never believe it,” she said, “but I just found two more Hoosiers on this airplane.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“They weren’t born Hoosiers, but they live there now. They live in Indianapolis.”

“Very interesting.”

“You want to meet them?”

“You think I should?”

The question baffled her. “They’re your fellow Hoosiers.”

“What are their names?”

“Her name is Conners and his name is Hoenikker. They’re brother and sister, and he’s a midget. He’s a nice midget, though.” She winked. “He’s a smart little thing.”

“Does he call you Mom?”

“I almost asked him to. And then I stopped, and I wondered if maybe it wouldn’t be rude to ask a midget to do that.”

“Nonsense.”

So I went aft to talk to Angela Hoenikker Conners and little Newton Hoenikker, members of my karass .

Angela was the horse-faced platinum blonde I had noticed earlier.

Newt was a very tiny young man indeed, though not grotesque. He was as nicely scaled as Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians, and as shrewdly watchful, too.

He held a glass of champagne, which was included in the price of his ticket. That glass was to him what a fishbowl would have been to a normal man, but he drank from it with elegant ease — as though he and the glass could not have been better matched.

The little son of a bitch had a crystal of ice-nine in a thermos bottle in his luggage, and so did his miserable sister, while under us was God’s own amount of water, the Caribbean Sea.

When Hazel had got all the pleasure she could from introducing Hoosiers to Hoosiers, she left us alone. “Remember,” she said as she left us, “from now on, call me Mom .”

“O.K., Mom,” I said.

“O.K., Mom,” said Newt. His voice was fairly high, in keeping with his little larynx. But he managed to make that voice distinctly masculine.

Angela persisted in treating Newt like an infant — and he forgave her for it with an amiable grace I would have thought impossible for one so small.

Newt and Angela remembered me, remembered the letters I’d written, and invited me to take the empty seat in their group of three.

Angela apologized to me for never having answered my letters.

“I couldn’t think of anything to say that would interest anybody reading a book. I could have made up something about that day, but I didn’t think you’d want that. Actually, the day was just like a regular day.”

“Your brother here wrote me a very good letter.”

Angela was surprised. “Newt did? How could Newt remember anything?” She turned to him. “Honey, you don’t remember anything about that day, do you? You were just a baby.”

“I remember,” he said mildly.

“I wish I’d seen the letter.” She implied that Newt was still too immature to deal directly with the outside world. Angela was a God-awfully insensitive woman, with no feeling for what smallness meant to Newt.

“Honey, you should have showed me that letter,” she scolded.

“Sorry,” said Newt. “I didn’t think.”

“I might as well tell you,” Angela said to me, “Dr. Breed told me I wasn’t supposed to co-operate with you. He said you weren’t interested in giving a fair picture of Father.” She showed me that she didn’t like me for that.

I placated her some by telling her that the book would probably never be done anyway, that I no longer had a clear idea of what it would or should mean.

“Well, if you ever do do the book, you better make Father a saint, because that’s what he was.”

I promised that I would do my best to paint that picture. I asked if she and Newt were bound for a family reunion with Frank in San Lorenzo.

“Frank’s getting married,” said Angela. “We’re going to the engagement party.”

“Oh? Who’s the lucky girl?”

“I’ll show you,” said Angela, and she took from her purse a billfold that contained a sort of plastic accordion. In each of the accordion’s pleats was a photograph. Angela flipped through the photographs, giving me glimpses of little Newt on a Cape Cod beach, of Dr. Felix Hoenikker accepting his Nobel Prize, of Angela’s own homely twin girls, of Frank flying a model plane on the end of a string.

And then she showed me a picture of the girl Frank was going to marry.

She might, with equal effect, have struck me in the groin.

The picture she showed me was of Mona Aamons Monzano, the woman I loved.

Once Angela had opened her plastic accordion, she was reluctant to close it until someone had looked at every photograph.