Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

I expected something pathological, but I did not expect the depth, the violence, and the almost intolerable beauty of the disease.

Angela moistened and warmed the mouthpiece, but did not blow a single preliminary note. Her eyes glazed over, and her long, bony fingers twittered idly over the noiseless keys.

I waited anxiously, and I remembered what Marvin Breed had told me — that Angela’s one escape from her bleak life with her father was to her room, where she would lock the door and play along with phonograph records.

Newt now put a long-playing record on the large phonograph in the room off the terrace. He came back with the record’s slipcase, which he handed to me.

The record was called Cat House Piano . It was of unaccompanied piano by Meade Lux Lewis.

Since Angela, in order to deepen her trance, let Lewis play his first number without joining him, I read some of what the jacket said about Lewis.

“Born in Louisville, Ky., in 1905,” I read, “Mr. Lewis didn’t turn to music until he had passed his 16th birthday and then the instrument provided by his father was the violin. A year later young Lewis chanced to hear Jimmy Yancey play the piano. ‘This,’ as Lewis recalls, ‘was the real thing.’ Soon,” I read, “Lewis was teaching himself to play the boogie-woogie piano, absorbing all that was possible from the older Yancey, who remained until his death a close friend and idol to Mr. Lewis. Since his father was a Pullman porter,” I read, “the Lewis family lived near the railroad. The rhythm of the trains soon became a natural pattern to young Lewis and he composed the boogie-woogie solo, now a classic of its kind, which became known as ‘Honky Tonk Train Blues.’ ”

I looked up from my reading. The first number on the record was done. The phonograph needle was now scratching its slow way across the void to the second. The second number, I learned from the jacket, was “Dragon Blues.”

Meade Lux Lewis played four bars alone–and then Angela Hoenikker joined in.

Her eyes were closed.

I was flabbergasted.

She was great.

She improvised around the music of the Pullman porter’s son; went from liquid lyricism to rasping lechery to the shrill skittishness of a frightened child, to a heroin nightmare.

Her glissandi spoke of heaven and hell and all that lay between.

Such music from such a woman could only be a case of schizophrenia or demonic possession.

My hair stood on end, as though Angela were rolling on the floor, foaming at the mouth, and babbling fluent Babylonian.

When the music was done, I shrieked at Julian Castle, who was transfixed, too, “My God — life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?”

“Don’t try,” he said. “Just pretend you understand.”

“That’s — that’s very good advice.” I went limp.

Castle quoted another poem:

“What’s that from?” I asked.

“What could it possibly be from but The Books of Bokonon? ”

“I’d love to see a copy sometime.”

“Copies are hard to come by,” said Castle. “They aren’t printed. They’re made by hand. And, of course, there is no such thing as a completed copy, since Bokonon is adding things every day.”

Little Newt snorted. “Religion!”

“Beg your pardon?” Castle said.

“See the cat?” asked Newt. “See the cradle?”

Major General Franklin Hoenikker didn’t appear for supper.

He telephoned, and insisted on talking to me and to no one else. He told me that he was keeping a vigil by “Papa’s” bed; that “Papa” was dying in great pain. Frank sounded scared and lonely.

“Look,” I said, “why don’t I go back to my hotel, and you and I can get together later, when this crisis is over.”

“No, no, no. You stay right there! I want you to be where I can get hold of you right away!” He was panicky about my slipping out of his grasp. Since I couldn’t account for his interest in me, I began to feel panic, too.

“Could you give me some idea what you want to see me about?” I asked.

“Not over the telephone.”

“Something about your father?”

“Something about you .”

“Something I’ve done?”

“Something you’re going to do.”

I heard a chicken clucking in the background of Frank’s end of the line. I heard a door open, and xylophone music came from some chamber. The music was again “When Day Is Done.” And then the door was closed, and I couldn’t hear the music any more.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d give me some small hint of what you expect me to do — so I can sort of get set,” I said.

“ Zah-mah-ki-bo .”

“What?”

“It’s a Bokononist word.”

“I don’t know any Bokononist words.”

“Julian Castle’s there?”

“Yes.”

“Ask him,” said Frank. “I’ve got to go now.” He hung up. So I asked Julian Castle what zah-mah-ki-bo meant.

“You want a simple answer or a whole answer?”

“Let’s start with a simple one.”

“Fate — inevitable destiny.”

“Cancer,” said Julian Castle at dinner, when I told him that “Papa” was dying in pain.

“Cancer of what?”

“Cancer of about everything. You say he collapsed on the reviewing stand today?”

“He sure did,” said Angela.

“That was the effect of drugs,” Castle declared. “He’s at the point now where drugs and pain just about balance out. More drugs would kill him.”

“I’d kill myself, I think,” murmured Newt. He was sitting on a sort of folding high chair he took with him when he went visiting. It was made of aluminum tubing and canvas. “It beats sitting on a dictionary, an atlas, and a telephone book,” he’d said when he erected it.

“That’s what Corporal McCabe did, of course,” said Castle. “He named his major-domo as his successor, then he shot himself.”

“Cancer, too?” I asked.

“I can’t be sure; I don’t think so, though. Unrelieved villainy just wore him out, is my guess. That was all before my time.”

“This certainly is a cheerful conversation,” said Angela.

“I think everybody would agree that these are cheerful times,” said Castle.

“Well,” I said to him, “I’d think you would have more reasons for being cheerful than most, doing what you are doing with your life.”

“I once had a yacht, too, you know.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Having a yacht is a reason for being more cheerful than most, too.”

“If you aren’t ‘Papa’s’ doctor,” I said, “who is?”

“One of my staff, a Dr. Schlichter von Koenigswald.”

“A German?”

“Vaguely. He was in the S.S. for fourteen years. He was a camp physician at Auschwitz for six of those years.”

“Doing penance at the House of Hope and Mercy is he?”

“Yes,” said Castle, “and making great strides, too, saving lives right and left.”

“Good for him.”

“Yes. If he keeps going at his present rate, working night and day, the number of people he’s saved will equal the number of people he let die — in the year 3010.”

So there’s another member of my karass : Dr. Schlichter von Koenigswald.

Three hours after supper Frank still hadn’t come home. Julian Castle excused himself and went back to the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle.