Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

But the Elders’ scheme of having the misery of higher animals trickle down to microorganisms worked like a dream.

There was a lot more to the story than that. The author taught me a new term, which was “Finale Rack.” This was apparently from the vocabulary of pyrotechnicians, specialists in loud and bright but otherwise harmless nighttime explosions for climaxes of patriotic holidays. A Finale Rack was a piece of milled lumber maybe 3 meters long and 20 centimeters wide and 5 centimeters thick, with all sorts of mortars and rocket launchers nailed to it, linked in series by a single fuse.

When it seemed that a fireworks show was over, that was when the Master Pyrotechnician lit the fuse of the Finale Rack.

That is how the author characterized World War II and the few years that followed it. He called it “the Finale Rack of so-called Human Progress.”

If the author was right that the whole point of life on Earth was to make germs shape up so that they would be ready to ship out when the time came, then even the greatest human being in history, Shakespeare or Mozart or Lincoln or Voltaire or whoever, was nothing more than a Petri dish in the truly Grand Scheme of Things.

In the story, the Elders of Tralfamadore were indifferent, to say the least, to all the suffering going on. When 6,000 rebellious slaves were crucified on either side of the Appian Way back in good old 71 B.C.,the Elders would have been delighted if a crucified person had spit into the face of a Centurion, giving him pneumonia or TB.

If I had to guess when “The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore” was written, I would have to say, “A long, long time ago, after World War II but before the Korean War, which broke out in 1950, when I was 10.” There was no mention of Korea as part of the Finale Rack. There was a lot of talk about making the planet a paradise by killing all the bugs and germs, and generating electricity with atomic energy so cheaply that it wouldn’t even be metered, and making it possible for everybody to have an automobile that would make him or her mightier than 200 horses and 3 times faster than a cheetah, and incinerating the other half of the planet in case the people there got the idea that it was their sort of intelligence that was supposed to be exported to the rest of the Universe.

The story was very likely pirated from some other publication, so the omission of the author’s name may have been intentional. What sort of writer, after all, would submit a work of fiction for possible publication in Black Garterbelt?

I did not realize at the time how much that story affected me. Reading it was simply a way of putting off for just a little while my looking for another job and another place to live at the age of 51, with 2 lunatics in tow. But down deep the story was beginning to work like a buffered analgesic. What a relief it was, somehow, to have somebody else confirm what I had come to suspect toward the end of the Vietnam War, and particularly after I saw the head of a human being pillowed in the spilled guts of a water buffalo on the edge of a Cambodian village, that Humanity is going somewhere really nice was a myth for children under 6 years old, like the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.

Cough.

I’ll tell you one germ that’s ready to take off for the belt of Orion or the handle on the Big Dipper or whatever right now, somewhere on Earth, and that’s the gonorrhea I brought home from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, back in 1967. For a while there, it looked like I was going to have it for the rest of my life. By now it probably can eat broken glass and razor blades.

The TB germs which make me cough so much now, though, are pussycats. There are several drugs on the market which they have never learned to handle. The most potent of these was ordered for me weeks ago, and should be arriving from Rochester at any time. If any of my germs are thinking of themselves as space cadets, they can forget it. They aren’t going anywhere but down the toilet.

Bon voyage!

But listen to this: You know the 2 lists I’ve been working on, 1 of the women I’ve made love to, and 1 of the men, women, and children I’ve killed? It is becoming ever clearer that the lengths of the lists will be virtually identical! What a coincidence! When I started out with my list of lovers, I thought that however many of them there were might serve as my epitaph, a number and nothing more. But by golly if that same number couldn’t stand for the people I’ve killed!

There’s another miracle on the order of Tarkington’s students being on vacation during the diphtheria epidemic, and then again during the prison break. How much longer can I go on being an Atheist?

“There are more things in heaven and earth. . .“

Here is how I got a job at the prison across the lake on the same day Tarkington College fired me:

I came out of the garage, having read that germs, not people, were the darlings of the Universe. I got into my Mercedes, intending to go down to the Black Cat Café to pick up gossip, if I could, about anybody who was hiring anybody to do practically any kind of work anywhere in this valley. But all 4 tires went bloomp, bloomp, bloomp.

All 4 tires had been cored by Townies the night before. I got out of the Mercedes and realized that I had to urinate. But I didn’t want to do it in my own house. I didn’t want to talk to the crazy people in there. How is that for excitement? What germ ever lived a life so rich in challenges and opportunities?

At least nobody was shooting at me, and I wasn’t wanted by the police.

So I went into the tall weeds of a vacant lot across the street from and below my house, which was built on a slope. I whipped out my ding-dong and found it was aimed down at a beautiful white Italian racing bicycle lying on its side. The bicycle was so full of magic and innocence, hiding there. It might have been a unicorn.

After urinating elsewhere, I set that perfect artificial animal upright. It was brand-new. It had a seat like a banana. Why had somebody thrown it away? To this day I do not know. Despite our enormous brains and jam-packed libraries, we germ hotels cannot expect to understand absolutely everything. My guess is that some kid from a poor family in the town below came across it while skulking around the campus. He assumed, as would I, that it belonged to some Tarkington student who was superrich, who probably had an expensive car and more beautiful clothes than he could ever wear. So he took it, as would I when my turn came. But he lost his nerve, as I would not, and hid it in the weeds rather than face arrest for grand larceny.

As I would soon find out the hard way, the bike actually belonged to a poor person, a teenage boy who worked in the stable after school, who had scrimped and saved until he could afford to buy as splendid a bicycle as had ever been seen on the campus of Tarkington.

To play with my mistaken scenario of the bike’s be-longing to a rich kid: It seemed possible to me that some rich kid had so many expensive playthings that he couldn’t be bothered with taking care of this one. Maybe it wouldn’t fit into the trunk of his Ferrari Gran Turismo. You wouldn’t believe all the treasures, diamond earrings, Rolex watches, and on and on, that wound up unclaimed in the college’s Lost and Found.

Do I resent rich people? No. The best or worst I can do is notice them. I agree with the great Socialist writer George Tarwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money. I would discover this to be the majority opinion in the prison across the lake as well, although nobody over there had ever heard of George Orwell. Many of the inmates themselves had been poor people with money before they were caught, with the most costly cars and jewelry and watches and clothe~. Many, as teenage drug dealers, had no doubt owned bicycles as desirable as the one I found in the weeds in the highlands of Scipio.