Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

We awoke. Jack said to me, “They’re playing our tune, Gene. They’re playing our tune.”

Before I went to work at Athena, I had seen only 3 convicts anywhere in the valley. Most people in Scipio hadn’t seen even 1. I wouldn’t have seen even 1, either, if a truck with a steel box in back hadn’t broken down at the head of the lake. I was picnicking there, near the water, with Margaret, my wife, and Mildred, my mother-in-law. Mildred was crazy as a bedbug by then, but Margaret was still sane, and there seemed a good chance that she always would be.

I was only 45, foolishly confident that I would go on teaching here until I reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 in 2010, 9 years from now. What in fact will happen to me in 9 more years? That is like worrying about a cheese spoiling if you don’t put it in the refrigerator. What can happen to a pricelessly stinky cheese that hasn’t already happened to it?

My mother-in-law, no danger to herself or anyone else, adored fishing. I had put a worm on her hook for her and pitched it out to a spot that looked promising. She gripped the rod with both hands, sure as always that something miraculous was about to happen.

She was right this time.

I looked up at the top of the bank, and there was a prison truck with smoke pouring out of its engine compartment. There were only 2 guards on board, and 1 of them was the driver. They bailed out. They had already radioed the prison for help. They were both white. This was before the Japanese took over Athena as a business proposition, before the road signs all the way from Rochester were in both English and Japanese.

It looked as though the truck might catch fire, so the 2 guards unlocked the little door in the back of the steel box and told the prisoners to come out. And then they backed off and waited with sawed-off automatic shotguns leveled at the little door.

Out the prisoners came. There were only 3 of them, clumsy in leg irons, and their handcuffs were shackled to chains around their waists. Two were black and 1 was white, or possibly a light Hispanic. This was before the Supreme Court confirmed that it was indeed cruel and inhuman punishment to confine a person in a place where his or her race was greatly outnumbered by another 1.

The races were still mixed in prisons throughout the country. When I later went to work at Athena, though, there was nothing but people who had been classified as Black in there.

My mother-in-law did not turn around to see the smoking van and all. She was obsessed by what might happen at any moment at the other end of her flshlme. But Margaret and 1 gawked. For us back then, pnsoners were like pornography, common things nice people shouldn’t want to see, even though the biggest industry by far in this valley was punishment.

When Margaret and I talked about it later, she didn’t say it was like pornography. She said it was like seeing animals on their way to a slaughterhouse.

We, in turn, must have looked to those convicts like people in Paradise. It was a balmy day in the springtime. A sailboat race was going on to the south of us. The college had just been given 30 little sloops by a grateful parent who had cleaned out the biggest savings and loan bank in California.

Our brand-new Mercedes sedan was parked on the beach nearby. It cost more than my annual salary at Tarkington. The car was a gift from the mother of a student of mine named Pierre LeGrand. His maternal grandfather had been dictator of Haiti, and had taken the treasury of that country with him when he was overthrown. That was why Pierre’s mother was so rich. He was very unpopular. He tried to win friends by making expensive gifts to them, but that didn’t work, so he tried to hang himself from a girder of the water tower on top of Musket Mountain. I happened to be up there, in the bushes with the wife of the coach of the Tennis Team.

So I cut him down with my Swiss Army knife. That was how I got the Mercedes.

Pierre would have better luck 2 years later, jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, and a campus joke was that now I had to give the Mercedes back.

So there were plenty of heartaches in what, as I’ve said, must have looked to those 3 convicts like Paradise. There was no way they could tell that my mother-in-law was as crazy as a bedbug, as long as she kept her back to them. They could not know, and neither could I, of course, that hereditary insanity would hit my pretty wife like a ton of bricks in about 6 months’ time and turn her into a hag as scary as her mother.

If we had had our 2 kids with us on the beach, that would have completed the illusion that we lived in Paradise. They could have depicted another generation that found life as comfortable as we did. Both sexes would have been represented. We had a girl named Melanie and a boy named Eugene Debs Hartke, Jr. But they weren’t kids anymore. Melanie was 21, and studying mathematics at Cambridge University in England. Eugene Jr. was completing his senior year at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, and was 18, and had his own rock-and-roll band, and had composed maybe 100 songs by then.

But Melanie would have spoiled our tableau on the beach. Like my mother until she went to Weight Watchers, she was very heavy. That must be hereditary. If she had kept her back to the convicts, she might at least have concealed the fact that she had a bulbous nose like the late, great, alcoholic comedian W.C. Fields. Melanie, thank goodness, was not also an alcoholic.

But her brother was.

And I could kill myself now for having boasted to him that on my side of the family the men had no fear of alcohol, since they knew how to drink in moderation.

We were not weak and foolish where drugs were concerned.

At least Eugene Jr. was beautiful, having inherited the features of his mother. When he was growing up in this valley, people could not resist saying to me, with him right there to hear it, that he was the most beautiful child they’d ever seen.

I have no idea where he is now. He stopped communicating with me or anybody in this valley years ago.

He hates me.

So does Melanie, although she wrote to me as recently as 2 years ago. She was living in Paris with another woman. They were both teaching English and math in an American high school over there.

My kids will never forgive me for not putting my mother-in-law into a mental hospital instead of keeping her at home, where she was a great embarrassment to them. They couldn’t bring friends home. If I had put Mildred into a nuthouse, though, I couldn’t have afforded to send Melanie and Eugene Jr. to such expensive schools. I got a free house at Tarkington, but my salary was small.

Also, I didn’t think Mildred’s craziness was as unbearable as they did. In the Army I had grown used to people who talked nonsense all day long. Vietnam was I big hallucination. After adjusting to that, I could adjust to anything.

What my children most dislike me for, though, is my reproducing in conjunction with their mother. They live in constant dread of suddenly going as batty as Mildred and Margaret. Unfortunately, there is a good chance of that.

Ironically enough, I happen to have an illegitimate son about whom I learned only recently. Since he had a different mother, he need not expect to go insane someday. Some of his kids, if he ever has any, could inherit my own mother’s tendency to fatness, though.

But they could join Weight Watchers as Mother did.

Heredity is obviously much on my mind these days, and should be. So I have been reading up on it some in a book that also deals with embryology. And I tell you:

People who are wary of what they might find in a book if they opened I are right to be. I have just had my mind blown by an essay on the embryology of the human eye. No combination of Time and Luck could have produced a camera that excellent, not even if the quantity of time had been 1,000,000,000,000 years! How is that for an unsolved mystery?