Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

So I had a night to kill in Ilium. I was already in the beginning and end of night life in Ilium, the Del Prado Hotel. Its bar, the Cape Cod Room, was a hangout for whores.

As it happened — “as it was meant to happen,” Bokonon would say — the whore next to me at the bar and the bartender serving me had both gone to high school with Franklin Hoenikker, the bug tormentor, the middle child, the missing son.

The whore, who said her name was Sandra, offered me delights unobtainable outside of Place Pigalle and Port Said. I said I wasn’t interested, and she was bright enough to say that she wasn’t really interested either. As things turned out, we had both overestimated our apathies, but not by much.

Before we took the measure of each other’s passions, however, we talked about Frank Hoenikker, and we talked about the old man, and we talked a little about Asa Breed, and we talked about the General Forge and Foundry Company, and we talked about the Pope and birth control, about Hitler and the Jews. We talked about phonies. We talked about truth. We talked about gangsters; we talked about business. We talked about the nice poor people who went to the electric chair; and we talked about the rich bastards who didn’t. We talked about religious people who had perversions. We talked about a lot of things.

We got drunk.

The bartender was very nice to Sandra. He liked her. He respected her. He told me that Sandra had been chairman of the Class Colors Committee at Ilium High. Every class, he explained, got to pick distinctive colors for itself in its junior year, and then it got to wear those colors with pride.

“What colors did you pick?” I asked.

“Orange and black.”

“Those are good colors.”

“I thought so.”

“Was Franklin Hoenikker on the Class Colors Committee, too?”

“He wasn’t on anything,” said Sandra scornfully. “He never got on any committee, never played any game, never took any girl out. I don’t think he ever even talked to a girl. We used to call him Secret Agent X-9.”

“X-9?”

“You know — he was always acting like he was on his way between two secret places; couldn’t ever talk to anybody.”

“Maybe he really did have a very rich secret life,” I suggested.

“Nah.”

“Nah,” sneered the bartender. “He was just one of those kids who made model airplanes and jerked off all the time.”

“He was suppose to be our commencement speaker,” said Sandra.

“Who was?” I asked.

“Dr. Hoenikker — the old man.”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t show up.”

“So you didn’t get a commencement address?”

“Oh, we got one. Dr. Breed, the one you’re gonna see tomorrow, he showed up, all out of breath, and he gave some kind of talk.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he hoped a lot of us would have careers in science,” she said. She didn’t see anything funny in that. She was remembering a lesson that had impressed her. She was repeating it gropingly, dutifully. “He said, the trouble with the world was…” She had to stop and think.

“The trouble with the world was,” she continued hesitatingly, “that people were still superstitious instead of scientific. He said if everybody would study science more, there wouldn’t be all the trouble there was.”

“He said science was going to discover the basic secret of life someday,” the bartender put in. He scratched his head and frowned. “Didn’t I read in the paper the other day where they’d finally found out what it was?”

“I missed that,” I murmured.

“I saw that,” said Sandra. “About two days ago.”

“That’s right,” said the bartender.

“What is the secret of life?” I asked.

“I forget,” said Sandra.

“Protein,” the bartender declared. “They found out something about protein.”

“Yeah,” said Sandra, “that’s it.”

An older bartender came over to join in our conversation in the Cape Cod Room of the Del Prado. When he heard that I was writing a book about the day of the bomb, he told me what the day had been like for him, what the day had been like in the very bar in which we sat. He had a W. C. Fields twang and a nose like a prize strawberry.

“It wasn’t the Cape Cod Room then,” he said. “We didn’t have all these fugging nets and seashells around. It was called the Navajo Tepee in those days. Had Indian blankets and cow skulls on the walls. Had little tom-toms on the tables. People were supposed to beat on the tom-toms when they wanted service. They tried to get me to wear a war bonnet, but I wouldn’t do it. Real Navajo Indian came in here one day; told me Navajos didn’t live in tepees. ‘That’s a fugging shame,’ I told him. Before that it was the Pompeii Room, with busted plaster all over the place; but no matter what they call the room, they never change the fugging light fixtures. Never changed the fugging people who come in or the fugging town outside, either. The day they dropped Hoenikker’s fugging bomb on the Japanese a bum came in and tried to scrounge a drink. He wanted me to give him a drink on account of the world was coming to an end. So I mixed him an ‘End of the World Delight.’ I gave him about a half-pint of creme de menthe in a hollowed-out pineapple, with whipped cream and a cherry on top. ‘There, you pitiful son of a bitch,’ I said to him, ‘don’t ever say I never did anything for you.’ Another guy came in, and he said he was quitting his job at the Research Laboratory; said anything a scientist worked on was sure to wind up as a weapon, one way or another. Said he didn’t want to help politicians with their fugging wars anymore. Name was Breed. I asked him if he was any relation to the boss of the fugging Research Laboratory. He said he fugging well was. Said he was the boss of the Research Laboratory’s fugging son.”

Ah, God, what an ugly city Ilium is!

“Ah, God,” says Bokonon, “what an ugly city every city is!”

Sleet was falling through a motionless blanket of smog. It was early morning. I was riding in the Lincoln sedan of Dr. Asa Breed. I was vaguely ill, still a little drunk from the night before. Dr. Breed was driving. Tracks of a long-abandoned trolley system kept catching the wheels of his car.

Breed was a pink old man, very prosperous, beautifully dressed. His manner was civilized, optimistic, capable, serene. I, by contrast, felt bristly, diseased, cynical. I had spent the night with Sandra.

My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat fur.

I thought the worst of everyone, and I knew some pretty sordid things about Dr. Asa Breed, things Sandra had told me.

Sandra told me everyone in Ilium was sure that Dr. Breed had been in love with Felix Hoenikker’s wife. She told me that most people thought Breed was the father of all three Hoenikker children.

“Do you know Ilium at all?” Dr. Breed suddenly asked me.

“This is my first visit.”

“It’s a family town.”

“Sir?”

“There isn’t much in the way of night life. Everybody’s life pretty much centers around his family and his home.”

“That sounds very wholesome.”

“It is. We have very little juvenile delinquency.”

“Good.”

“Ilium has a very interesting history, you know.”

“That’s very interesting.”

“It used to be the jumping-off place, you know.”

“Sir?”

“For the Western migration.”

“Oh.”

“People used to get outfitted here.”

“That’s very interesting.”

“Just about where the Research Laboratory is now was the old stockade. That was where they held the public hangings, too, for the whole county.”