Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

Now, hoping to be hearty and persuasive, he said tinny things to me, things like, “I like the cut of your jib!” and “I want to talk cold turkey to you, man to man!”

And he took me down to what he called his “den” in order that we might, “...call a spade a spade, and let the chips fall where they may.”

So we went down steps cut into a cliff and into a natural cave that was beneath and behind the waterfall. There were a couple of drawing tables down there; three pale, bare-boned Scandinavian chairs; a bookcase containing books on architecture, books in German, French, Finnish, Italian, English.

All was lit by electric lights, lights that pulsed with the panting of the motor-generator set.

And the most striking thing about the cave was that there were pictures painted on the walls, painted with kindergarten boldness, painted with the flat clay, earth, and charcoal colors of very early man. I did not have to ask Frank how old the cave paintings were. I was able to date them by their subject. The paintings were not of mammoths or saber-toothed tigers or ithyphallic cave bears.

The paintings treated endlessly the aspects of Mona Aamons Monzano as a little girl.

“This — this is where Mona’s father worked?” I asked.

“That’s right. He was the Finn who designed the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle.”

“I know.”

“That isn’t what I brought you down here to talk about.”

“This is something about your father?”

“This is about you .” Frank put his hand on my shoulder and he looked me in the eye. The effect was dismaying. Frank meant to inspire camaraderie, but his head looked to me like a bizarre little owl, blinded by light and perched on a tall white post.

“Maybe you’d better come to the point.”

“There’s no sense in beating around the bush,” he said. “I’m a pretty good judge of character, if I do say so myself, and I like the cut of your jib.”

“Thank you.”

“I think you and I could really hit it off.”

“I have no doubt of it.”

“We’ve both got things that mesh.”

I was grateful when he took his hand from my shoulder. He meshed the fingers of his hands like gear teeth. One hand represented him, I suppose, and the other represented me.

“We need each other.” He wiggled his fingers to show me how gears worked.

I was silent for some time, though outwardly friendly.

“Do you get my meaning?” asked Frank at last.

“You and I — we’re going to do something together?”

“That’s right!” Frank clapped his hands. “You’re a worldly person, used to meeting the public; and I’m a technical person, used to working behind the scenes, making things go.”

“How can you possibly know what kind of a person I am? We’ve just met.”

“Your clothes, the way you talk.” He put his hand on my shoulder again. “I like the cut of your jib!”

“So you said.”

Frank was frantic for me to complete his thought, to do it enthusiastically, but I was still at sea. “Am I to understand that… that you are offering me some kind of job here, here in San Lorenzo?”

He clapped his hands. He was delighted. “That’s right! What would you say to a hundred thousand dollars a year?”

“Good God!” I cried. “What would I have to do for that?”

“Practically nothing. And you’d drink out of gold goblets every night and eat off of gold plates and have a palace all your own.”

“What’s the job?”

“President of the Republic of San Lorenzo.”

“Me? President?” I gasped.

“Who else is there?”

“Nuts!”

“Don’t say no until you’ve really thought about it.” Frank watched me anxiously.

“No!”

“You haven’t really thought about it.”

“Enough to know it’s crazy.”

Frank made his fingers into gears again. “We’d work together . I’d be backing you up all the time.”

“Good. So, if I got plugged from the front you’d get it, too.”

“Plugged?”

“Shot! Assassinated!”

Frank was mystified. “Why would anybody shoot you?”

“So he could get to be President.”

Frank shook his head. “Nobody in San Lorenzo wants to be President,” he promised me. “It’s against their religion.”

“It’s against your religion, too? I thought you were going to be the next President.”

“I…” he said, and found it hard to go on. He looked haunted.

“You what?” I asked.

He faced the sheet of water that curtained the cave. “Maturity, the way I understand it,” he told me, “is knowing what your limitations are.”

He wasn’t far from Bokonon in defining maturity. “Maturity,” Bokonon tells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”

“I know I’ve got limitations,” Frank continued. “They’re the same limitations my father had.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve got a lot of very good ideas, just the way my father did,” Frank told me and the waterfall, “but he was no good at facing the public, and neither am I.”

“You’ll take the job?” Frank inquired anxiously.

“No,” I told him.

“Do you know anybody who might want the job?” Frank was giving a classic illustration of what Bokonon calls duffle . Duffle , in the Bokononist sense, is the destiny of thousands upon thousands of persons when placed in the hands of a stuppa . A stuppa is a fogbound child.

I laughed.

“Something’s funny?”

“Pay no attention when I laugh,” I begged him. “I’m a notorious pervert in that respect.”

“Are you laughing at me?” I shook my head.

“No.”

“Word of honor?”

“Word of honor.”

“People used to make fun of me all the time.”

“You must have imagined that.”

“They used to yell things at me. I didn’t imagine that .”

“People are unkind sometimes without meaning to be,” I suggested. I wouldn’t have given him my word of honor on that.

“You know what they used to yell at me?”

“No.”

“They used to yell at me, ‘Hey, X-9, where you going?’ ”

“That doesn’t seem too bad.”

“That’s what they used to call me,” said Frank in sulky reminiscence, “ ‘Secret Agent X-9.’ ”

I didn’t tell him I knew that already.

“ ‘Where are you going, X-9?’ ” Frank echoed again.

I imagined what the taunters had been like, imagined where Fate had eventually goosed and chivvied them to. The wits who had yelled at Frank were surely nicely settled in deathlike jobs at General Forge and Foundry, at Ilium Power and Light, at the Telephone Company..

And here, by God, was Secret Agent X-9, a Major General, offering to make me king… in a cave that was curtained by a tropical waterfall.

“They really would have been surprised if I’d stopped and told them where I was going.”

“You mean you had some premonition you’d end up here?” It was a Bokononist question.

“I was going to Jack’s Hobby Shop,” he said, with no sense of anticlimax.

“Oh.”

“They all knew I was going there, but they didn’t know what really went on there. They would have been really surprised — especially the girls — if they’d found out what really went on. The girls didn’t think I knew anything about girls.”

“What really went on?”

“I was screwing Jack’s wife every day. That’s how come I fell asleep all the time in high school. That’s how come I never achieved my full potential.”