Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

“That was one of his hobbies,” said Miss Faust.

“What was?”

“Photographing how cannonballs are stacked on different courthouse lawns. Apparently how they’ve got them stacked in that picture is very unusual.”

“I see.”

“He was an unusual man.”

“I agree.”

“Maybe in a million years everybody will be as smart as he was and see things the way he did. But, compared with the average person of today, he was as different as a man from Mars.”

“Maybe he really was a Martian,” I suggested.

“That would certainly go a long way toward explaining his three strange kids.”

While Miss Faust and I waited for an elevator to take us to the first floor, Miss Faust said she hoped the elevator that came would not be number five. Before I could ask her why this was a reasonable wish, number five arrived.

Its operator was a small ancient Negro whose name was Lyman Enders Knowles. Knowles was insane, I’m almost sure — offensively so, in that he grabbed his own behind and cried, “Yes, yes!” whenever he felt that he’d made a point.

“Hello, fellow anthropoids and lily pads and paddlewheels,” he said to Miss Faust and me. “Yes, yes!”

“First floor, please,” said Miss Faust coldly.

All Knowles had to do to close the door and get us to the first floor was to press a button, but he wasn’t going to do that yet. He wasn’t going to do it, maybe, for years.

“Man told me,” he said, “that these here elevators was Mayan architecture. I never knew that till today. And I says to him, ‘What’s that make me — mayonnaise?’ Yes, yes! And while he was thinking that over, I hit him with a question that straightened him up and made him think twice as hard! Yes, yes!”

“Could we please go down, Mr. Knowles?” begged Miss Faust.

“I said to him,” said Knowles, “ ‘This here’s a re -search laboratory. Re -search means look again , don’t it? Means they’re looking for something they found once and it got away somehow, and now they got to re -search for it? How come they got to build a building like this, with mayonnaise elevators and all, and fill it with all these crazy people? What is it they’re trying to find again? Who lost what?’ Yes, yes!”

“That’s very interesting,” sighed Miss Faust. “Now, could we go down?”

“Only way we can go is down,” barked Knowles. “This here’s the top. You ask me to go up and wouldn’t be a thing I could do for you. Yes, yes!”

“So let’s go down,” said Miss Faust.

“Very soon now. This gentleman here been paying his respects to Dr. Hoenikker?”

“Yes,” I said. “Did you know him?”

“ Intimately ,” he said. “You know what I said when he died?”

“No.”

“I said, ‘Dr. Hoenikker — he ain’t dead.’ ”

“Oh?”

“Just entered a new dimension. Yes, yes!” He punched a button, and down we went.

“Did you know the Hoenikker children?” I asked him.

“Babies full of rabies,” he said. “Yes, yes!”

There was one more thing I wanted to do in Ilium. I wanted to get a photograph of the old man’s tomb. So I went back to my room, found Sandra gone, picked up my camera, hired a cab.

Sleet was still coming down, acid and gray. I thought the old man’s tombstone in all that sleet might photograph pretty well, might even make a good picture for the jacket of The Day the World Ended .

The custodian at the cemetery gate told me how to find the Hoenikker burial plot. “Can’t miss it,” he said. “It’s got the biggest marker in the place.”

He did not lie. The marker was an alabaster phallus twenty feet high and three feet thick. It was plastered with sleet.

“By God,” I exclaimed, getting out of the cab with my camera, “how’s that for a suitable memorial to a father of the atom bomb?” I laughed.

I asked the driver if he’d mind standing by the monument in order to give some idea of scale. And then I asked him to wipe away some of the sleet so the name of the deceased would show.

He did so.

And there on the shaft in letters six inches high, so help me God, was the word:

MOTHER

“Mother?” asked the driver, incredulously.

I wiped away more sleet and uncovered this poem:

And under this poem was yet another;

And underneath this, inset in the shaft, was a square of cement bearing the imprint of an infant’s hand. Beneath the imprint were the words:

Baby Newt.

“If that’s Mother,” said the driver, “what in hell could they have raised over Father?” He made an obscene suggestion as to what the appropriate marker might be.

We found Father close by. His memorial — as specified in his will, I later discovered — was a marble cube forty centimeters on each side.

“FATHER,” it said.

As we were leaving the cemetery the driver of the cab worried about the condition of his own mother’s grave. He asked if I would mind taking a short detour to look at it.

It was a pathetic little stone that marked his mother— not that it mattered.

And the driver asked me if I would mind another brief detour, this time to a tombstone salesroom across the street from the cemetery.

I wasn’t a Bokononist then, so I agreed with some peevishness. As a Bokononist, of course, I would have agreed gaily to go anywhere anyone suggested. As Bokonon says: “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”

The name of the tombstone establishment was Avram Breed and Sons. As the driver talked to the salesman I wandered among the monuments — blank monuments, monuments in memory of nothing so far.

I found a little institutional joke in the showroom: over a stone angel hung mistletoe. Cedar boughs were heaped on her pedestal, and around her marble throat was a necklace of Christmas tree lamps.

“How much for her?” I asked the salesman.

“Not for sale. She’s a hundred years old. My greatgrandfather, Avram Breed, carved her.”

“This business is that old?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re a Breed?”

“The fourth generation in this location.”

“Any relation to Dr. Asa Breed, the director of the Research Laboratory?”

“His brother.” He said his name was Marvin Breed.

“It’s a small world,” I observed.

“When you put it in a cemetery, it is.” Marvin Breed was a sleek and vulgar, a smart and sentimental man.

“I just came from your brother’s office. I’m a writer. I was interviewing him about Dr. Hoenikker,” I said to Marvin Breed.

“There was one queer son of a bitch. Not my brother; I mean Hoenikker.”

“Did you sell him that monument for his wife?”

“I sold his kids that. He didn’t have anything to do with it. He never got around to putting any kind of marker on her grave. And then, after she’d been dead for a year or more, Hoenikker’s three kids came in here — the big tall girl, the boy, and the little baby. They wanted the biggest stone money could buy, and the two older ones had poems they’d written. They wanted the poems on the stone.

“You can laugh at that stone, if you want to,” said Marvin Breed, “but those kids got more consolation out of that than anything else money could have bought. They used to come and look at it and put flowers on it I-don’t-know-how-many-times a year.”