Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

“Hello,” he said to me, sleepily.

“Hello,” I said. “I like your painting.”

“You see what it is?”

“I suppose it means something different to everyone who sees it.”

“It’s a cat’s cradle.”

“Aha,” I said. “Very good. The scratches are string. Right?”

“One of the oldest games there is, cat’s cradle. Even the Eskimos know it.”

“You don’t say.”

“For maybe a hundred thousand years or more, grownups have been waving tangles of string in their children’s faces.”

“Um.”

Newt remained curled in the chair. He held out his painty hands as though a cat’s cradle were strung between them. “No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s…”

“And?”

“ No damn cat, and no damn cradle .”

And then Angela Hoenikker Conners, Newt’s beanpole sister, came in with Julian Castle, father of Philip, and founder of the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle. Castle wore a baggy white linen suit and a string tie. He had a scraggly mustache. He was bald. He was scrawny. He was a saint, I think.

He introduced himself to Newt and to me on the cantilevered terrace. He forestalled all references to his possible saintliness by talking out of the corner of his mouth like a movie gangster.

“I understand you are a follower of Albert Schweitzer,” I said to him.

“At a distance…” He gave a criminal sneer. “I’ve never met the gentleman.”

“He must surely know of your work, just as you know of his.”

“Maybe and maybe not. You ever see him?”

“No.”

“You ever expect to see him?”

“Someday maybe I will.”

“Well,” said Julian Castle, “in case you run across Dr. Schweitzer in your travels, you might tell him that he is not my hero.” He lit a big cigar.

When the cigar was going good and hot he pointed its red end at me. “You can tell him he isn’t my hero,” he said, “but you can also tell him that, thanks to him, Jesus Christ is .”

“I think he’ll be glad to hear it.”

“I don’t give a damn if he is or not. This is something between Jesus and me.”

Julian Castle and Angela went to Newt’s painting. Castle made a pinhole of a curled index finger, squinted at the painting through it.

“What do you think of it?” I asked him.

“It’s black . What is it — hell?”

“It means whatever it means,” said Newt.

“Then it’s hell,” snarled Castle.

“I was told a moment ago that it was a cat’s cradle,” I said.

“Inside information always helps,” said Castle.

“I don’t think it’s very nice,” Angela complained. “I think it’s ugly, but I don’t know anything about modern art. Sometimes I wish Newt would take some lessons, so he could know for sure if he was doing something or not.”

“Self-taught, are you?” Julian Castle asked Newt.

“Isn’t everybody?” Newt inquired.

“Very good answer.” Castle was respectful.

I undertook to explain the deeper significance of the cat’s cradle, since Newt seemed disinclined to go through that song and dance again.

And Castle nodded sagely. “So this is a picture of the meaninglessness of it all! I couldn’t agree more.”

“Do you really agree?” I asked. “A minute ago you said something about Jesus.”

“Who?” said, Castle.

“Jesus Christ?”

“Oh,” said Castle. “H im .” He shrugged. “People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.”

“I see.” I knew I wasn’t going to have an easy time writing a popular article about him. I was going to have to concentrate on his saintly deeds and ignore entirely the satanic things he thought and said.

“You may quote me:” he said. “Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing.”

He leaned down and he shook little Newt’s painty hand. “Right?”

Newt nodded, seeming to suspect momentarily that the case had been a little overstated. “Right.”

And then the saint marched to Newt’s painting and took it from its easel. He beamed at us all. “Garbage — like everything else.”

And he threw the painting off the cantilevered terrace. It sailed out on an updraft, stalled, boomeranged back, sliced into the waterfall.

There was nothing little Newt could say.

Angela spoke first. “You’ve got paint all over your face, honey. Go wash it off.”

“Tell me, Doctor,” I said to Julian Castle, “how is ‘Papa’ Monzano?”

“How would I know?”

“I thought you’d probably been treating him.”

“We don’t speak…” Castle smiled. “He doesn’t speak to me, that is. The last thing he said to me, which was about three years ago, was that the only thing that kept me off the hook was my American citizenship.”

“What have you done to offend him? You come down here and with your own money found a free hospital for his people…”

“ ‘Papa’ doesn’t like the way we treat the whole patient,” said Castle, “particularly the whole patient when he’s dying. At the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle, we administer the last rites of the Bokononist Church to those who want them.”

“What are the rites like?”

“Very simple. They start with a responsive reading. You want to respond?”

“I’m not that close to death just now, if you don’t mind.”

He gave me a grisly wink. “You’re wise to be cautious. People taking the last rites have a way of dying on cue. I think we could keep you from going all the way, though, if we didn’t touch feet.”

“Feet?”

He told me about the Bokononist attitude relative to feet.

“That explains something I saw in the hotel.” I told him about the two painters on the window sill.

“It works, you know,” he said. “People who do that really do feel better about each other and the world.”

“Um.”

“ Boko-maru .”

“Sir?”

“That’s what the foot business is called,” said Castle. “It works. I’m grateful for things that work. Not many things do work, you know.”

“I suppose not.”

“I couldn’t possibly run that hospital of mine if it weren’t for aspirin and boko-maru .”

“I gather,” I said, “that there are still several Bokononists on the island, despite the laws, despite the hy-u-o-ook-kuh …”

He laughed. “You haven’t caught on, yet?”

“To what?”

“Everybody on San Lorenzo is a devout Bokononist, the hy-u-o-ook-kuh notwithstanding.”

“When Bokonon and McCabe took over this miserable country years ago,” said Julian Castle, “they threw out the priests. And then Bokonon, cynically and playfully, invented a new religion.”

“I know,” I said.

“Well, when it became evident that no governmental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.”

“How did he come to be an outlaw?”

“It was his own idea. He asked McCabe to outlaw him and his religion, too, in order to give the religious life of the people more zest, more tang. He wrote a little poem about it, incidentally.”