Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

The two houses, of course, were the Montagues and the Capulets, the feuding families of Romeo and Juliet,

whose nitwit hatred would indirectly cause Mercutio’s departure for Paradise.

I have lifted this speech from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. If more people would acknowledge that they got their pearls of wisdom from that book instead of the original, it might clear the air.

If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people’s vanity and foolishness.

When I heard a few months later, after I had gone to work at Athena, that Robert Moellenkamp had been wiped out and then some by Microsecond Arbitrage, and had had to sell his boats and his horses and his El Greco and all that, I assumed he quit the Board. Tarkington’s Trustees were expected to give a lot of money to the college every year. Otherwise why would Lowell Chung’s mother, who had to have everything that was said at meetings translated into Chinese, have been tolerated as a member of the Board?

Actually, I don’t think Mrs. Chung would have become a member if another Trustee, a Caucasian Tarkington classmate of Moellenkamp’s, John W. Fedders, Jr., hadn’t grown up in Hong Kong, and so could serve as her interpreter. His father was an importer of ivory and rhinoceros horns, which many Orientals believed to be aphrodisiacs. He also traded, it was suspected, in industrial quantities of opium. Fedders was perhaps the most conceited man I ever saw out of uniform. He thought his fluency in Chinese made him as brilliant as a nuclear physicist, as though 1,000,000,000 other people, including, no doubt, 1,000,000 morons, couldn’t speak Chinese.

When I met with the Trustees 2 years ago, and they had become hostages in the stable, I was surprised to see Moellenkamp. He had been allowed to stay on the Board, even though he didn’t have a nickel. Mrs. Chung had dropped out by then. Fedders was there. Wilder, as I’ve said, had since become a Trustee. There were some other new Trustees I didn’t know.

All the Trustees survived the ordeal of captivity, with nothing to eat but horse meat roasted over burning furniture in the huge fireplace in the Pavilion, although Fedders would be the worse for an untreated heart attack. While he was going through the worst of it, he spoke Chinese.

I wouldn’t be under indictment now if I hadn’t paid a compassionate visit to the hostages. They wouldn’t have known that I was within 1,000 kilometers of Scipio. But when I appeared to them, seemingly free to come and go as I pleased, and treated with deference by the Black man who was actually guarding me, they jumped to the conclusion that I was the mastermind behind the great escape.

It was a racist conclusion, based on the belief that Black people couldn’t mastermind anything. I will say so in court.

In Vietnam, though, I really was the mastermind. Yes, and that still bothers me. During my last year there, when my ammunition was language instead of bullets, I invented justifications for all the killing and dying we were doing which impressed even me! I was a genius of lethal hocus pocus!

You want to know how I used to begin my speeches to fresh troops who hadn’t yet been fed into the meat grinder? I squared my shoulders and threw out my chest so they could see all my ribbons, and I roared through a bullhorn, “Men, I want you to listen, and to listen good!”

And they did, they did.

I have been wondering lately how many human beings I actually killed with conventional weaponry. I don’t believe it was my conscience which suggested that I do this. It was the list of women I was making, trying to remember all the names and faces and places and dates, which led to the logical question: “Why not list all you’ve killed?”

So I think I will. It can’t be a list of names, since I never knew the name of anybody I killed. It has to be a list of dates and places. If my list of women isn’t to include high school or prostitutes, then my list of those whose lives I took shouldn’t include possibles and probables, or those killed by artillery or air strikes called in by me, and surely not all those, many of them Americans, who died as an indirect result of all my hocus pocus, all my blah blah blah.

I have long had a sort of ballpark figure in my head. I am quite sure that I killed more people than did my brother-in-law. I hadn’t been working as a teacher at Athena very long before it occurred to me that I had almost certainly killed more people than had the mass murderer Alton Darwin or anybody else serving time in there. That didn’t trouble me, and still doesn’t. I just think it is interesting.

It is like an old movie. Does that mean that something is wrong with me?

My lawyer, a mere stripling, has paid me a call. Since I have no money, the Federal Government is paying him to protect me from injustice. Moreover, I cannot be tortured or otherwise compelled to testify against myself. What a Utopia!

Among my fellow prisoners here, and the I,000s upon 1,000s of those across the lake, you better believe there’s a lot of jubilation about the Bill of Rights.

I told my lawyer about the two lists I am making. How can he help me if I don’t tell him everything.

“Why are you making them?” he said.

“To speed things up on Judgment Day,” I said.

“I thought you were an Atheist,” he said. He was hoping the Prosecuting Attorney wouldn’t get wind of that.

“You never know,” I said.

“I’m Jewish,” he said.

“I know that, and I pity you,” I said.

“Why do you pity me?” he said.

I said, “You’re trying to get through life with only half a Bible. That’s like trying to get from here to San Francisco with a road map that stops at Dubuque, Iowa.”

I told him I wanted to be buried with my 2 lists, so that, if there really was going to be a Judgment Day, I could say to the Judge, “Judge, I have found a way to save you some precious time in Eternity. You don’t have to look me up in the Book in Which All Things Are Recorded. Here’s a list of my worst sins. Send me straight to Hell, and no argument.”

He asked to see the 2 lists, so I showed him what I had written down so far. He was delighted, and especially by their messiness. There were all sorts of marginal notes about this or that woman or this or that corpse.

“The messier the better,” he said.

“How so?” I said.

And he said, “Any fair-minded jury looking at them will have to believe that you are in a deeply disturbed mental state, and probably have been for quite some time. They will already believe that all you Vietnam veterans are crazy, because that’s their reputation.”

“But the lists aren’t based on hallucinations,” I protested. “I’m not getting them from a radio set the CIAor the flying-saucer people put in my skull while I was sleeping. It all really happened.”

“All the same,” he said serenely. “All the same, all the same.”

After Robert Moellenkamp, broke-and-didn’t-know-it, said so grandly, “A plague on both your houses!” Jason Wilder commented that he did not feel, in the case under discussion, my case, that 2 houses were involved.

“I don’t believe there is 2 of anything involved,” he said. “I venture to say that even Mr. Hartke now agrees that this Board cannot conceive of any alternative to accepting his resignation. Am I right, Mr. Hartke?”

I got to my feet. “This is the second worst day of my life,” I said. “The first was the day we got kicked out of Vietnam. Shakespeare has been quoted twice so far. It so happens that I can quote him, too. I have always been bad at memorizing, but I had an English teacher in high school who insisted that everyone in her class know his most famous lines by heart. I never expected to speak them as being meaningful to me in real life, but now’s the time. Here goes: