Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

Rothko himself had long since committed suicide.

He had had enough.

He was out of here.

“She’s so short,” Muriel said to me. “I was so surprised how short she was.”

“Who’s so short?” I said.

“Gloria White,” she said.

I asked her what she thought of Henry Kissinger. She said she loved his voice.

I had seen him up on the Quadrangle. Although I had been an instrument of his geopolitics, I felt no connection between him and me. His face was certainly familiar. He might have been, like Gloria White, somebody who had been in a lot of movies I had seen.

I dreamed about him once here in prison, though. He was a woman. He was a Gypsy fortune-teller who looked into her crystal ball but wouldn’t say anything.

I said to Muriel, “You worry me.”

“I what?” she said.

“You look tired,” I said. “Do you get enough sleep?”

“Yes, thank you,” she said.

“Forgive me,” I said. “None of my business. It’s just that you were so full of life while you were talking about the motorcycle people. When you stopped, it was as though you took off a mask, and you seemed as though you were suddenly all wrung out.”

Muriel knew vaguely who I was. She had seen me with Margaret and Mildred in tow at least twice a week during the short time the ice cream parlor was in business. So I did not have to tell her that I, too, practically speaking, was without a mate. And she had seen with her own eyes how kind and patient I was with my worse than useless relatives.

So she was already favorably disposed to me. She trusted me, and responded with undisguised gratitude to my expressions of concern for her happiness.

“If you want to know the truth,” she said, “I hardly sleep at all, I worry so much about the children.” She had 2 of them. “The way things are going,” she said, “I don’t see how I can afford to send even 1 of them to college. I’m from a family where everybody went to college and never thought a thing about it. But that’s all over now. Neither I is an athlete.”

We might have become lovers that night, I think, instead of 2 weeks from then, if an ugly mountain of a man hadn’t entered raging, demanding to know, “All right, where is he? Where’s that kid?”

He was asking about the kid who worked at Tarkington’s stable after school, whose bicycle I had stolen. I had left the kid’s bike in plain view out front. Every other place of business on Clinton Street was boarded up, from the barge terminal to halfway up the hill. So the only place the boy could be, he thought, was inside the Black Cat Café or, worse, inside one of the vans out back in the parking lot.

I played dumb.

We went outside with him to find out what bicycle he could possibly be talking about. I offered him the theory that the boy was a good boy, and nowhere near the Black Cat Café, and that some bad person had borrowed the bike and left it there. So he put the bike on the back of his beat-up pickup truck, and said he was late for an appointment for ajob interview at the prison across the lake.

“What kind of a job?” I asked.

And he said, “They’re hiring teachers over there.”

I asked if I could come with him.

He said, “Not if you’re going to teach what I want to teach. What do you want to teach?”

“Anything you don’t want to teach,” I said.

“I want to teach shop,” he said. “You want to teach shop?”

“No,” I said.

“Word of honor?” he said.

“Word of honor,” I said.

“OK,” he said, “get in, get in.”

To understand how the lower ranks of guards at Athena in those days felt about White people, and never mind Black people, you have to realize that most of them were recruited from Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido. On Hokkaido the primitive natives, the Ainus, thought to be very ugly because they were so paffid and hairy, were White people. Genetically speaking, they are just as white as Nancy Reagan. Their ancestors long ago had made the error, when humiliated by superior Asiatic civilizations, of shambling north instead of west to Europe, and eventually, of course, to the Western Hemisphere.

Those White people on Hokkaido had sure missed a lot. They were way behind practically everybody. And when the man who wanted to teach shop and I presented ourselves at the gate to the road that led through the National Forest to the prison, the 2 guards on duty there were fresh from Hokkaido. For all the respect our being Whites inspired in them, we might as well have been a couple of drunk and disorderly Arapahos.

The man who wanted to teach shop said his name was John Donner. On the way over he asked me ill had seen him on the Phil Donahue show on TV. That was a 1-hour show every weekday afternoon, which featured a small group of real people, not actors, who had had the same sort of bad thing happen to them, and had triumphed over it or were barely coping or whatever. There were 2 very similar programs in competition with Donahue, and the old novelist Paul Slazinger used to watch all 3 simultaneously, switching back and forth.

I asked him why he did that. He said he didn’t want to miss the moment when, suddenly, there was absolutely nothing left to talk about.

I told John Donner that, unfortunately, I couldn’t watch any of those shows, since I taught Music Appreciation in the afternoon, and then Martial Arts after that. I asked him what his particular Donahue show had been about.

“People who were raised in foster homes and got beat up all the time,” he said.

I would see plenty of Donahue reruns at the prison, but not Donner’s. That show would have been coals to Newcastle at Athena, where practically everybody had been beaten regularly and severely when he was a little kid.

I didn’t see Donner on TV over there, but I did see myself a couple of times, or somebody who looked a whole lot like me in the distance, on old footage of the Vietnam War.

I even yelled 1 time at the prison, “There I am! There I am!”

Convicts gathered behind me, looking at the TV and saying, “Where? Where? Where?”

But they were too late. I was gone again.

Where did I go?

Here I am.

John Donner could have been a pathological liar. He could have made that up about being on Donahue. There was something very fishy about him. Then again, he could have been living under the Federal Witness Protection Program, with a new name and a fake biography GRIOT™ had written out for him. Statistically speaking, GRIOT™ would have to put it into a biography every so often, I suppose, that the fictitious subject was on Donahue.

He claimed that the boy he lived with was his son. But he could have kidnapped that kid whose bike I stole. They had come to town only about 18 months before, and kept to themselves.

I am sure his last name wasn’t Donner. I have known several Donners. One was a year behind me at the Academy. Two were unrelated Tarkingtonians. One was a First Sergeant in Vietnam who had his arm blown off by a little boy with a homemade handgrenade. Every one of those Donners knew the story of the infamous Don-

ncr Party, which got caught in a blizzard back in 1846 while trying to cross the Sierra Nevada Mountains in wagons to get to California. Their wagons were very likely made right here in Scipio.

I have just looked up the details in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in Chicago and owned by a mysterious Egyptian arms dealer living in Switzerland. Rule Britannia!

Those who survived the blizzard did so by becoming cannibals. The final tally, and several women and children were eaten, was 47 survivors out of 87 people who had begun the trip.