Kurt Vonnegut: Hocus Pocus

My lawyer told me that both sets of the Senator’s racially Japanese grandparents, one set immigrants, the other set native Californians, were put into a concentration camp when this country got into the Finale Rack. The camp, incidentally, was only a few kilometers west of the Donner Pass, named in honor of White cannibals. The feeling back then was that anybody with Japanese genes inside our borders was probably less loyal to the United States Constitution than to Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan.

The Senator’s father, however, served in an infantry battalion composed entirely of young Americans of Japanese extraction, which became our most decorated

unit taking part in the Italian Campaign during, again, the Finale Rack.

So I asked my lawyer to find out from the Ambassador if Hiroshi had left a note, and if there had been an autopsy performed to determine whether or not the deceased had ingested some foreign substance that might have made hara-kiri easier. I don’t know whether to call this friendship or morbid curiosity.

The answer came back that there was no note, and that there had been no autopsy, since the cause of death was so horribly obvious. There was this detail: A little girl who didn’t know him was the first person of any age or sex to see what he had chosen to do to himself.

She ran and told her mama.

Back when we were neighbors, I asked the Warden why he never left this valley, why he didn’t get away from the prison and me and the ignorant young guards and the bells across the lake and all the rest of it. He had years of leave time he had never used.

He said, “I would only meet more people.”

“You don’t like any kind of people?” I said. We were talking in a sort of joshing mode, so I could ask him that.

“I wish I had been born a bird instead,” he said. “I wish we had all been born birds instead.”

He never killed anybody and had the sex life of a calf kept alive for its veal alone.

I have lived more vividly, and I promised to tell at the end of this book the number I would like engraved on my tombstone, a number that represents both my 100-percent-legal military kills and my adulteries.

If people hear of the number at the end and its double

significance, some will turn to the end to learn the number in order to decide that it is too small or too big or just about right or whatever without reading the book. But I have devised a lock to thwart them. I have concealed its oddly shaped key in a problem that only those who have read the whole book will have no trouble solving.

So:

Take the year Eugene Debs died.

Subtract the title of the science fiction movie based on a novel by Arthur C. Clarke which I saw twice in Vietnam. Do not panic. This will give you a negative number, but Arabs in olden times taught us how to deal with such.

Add the year of Hitler’s birth. There! Everything is nice and positive again. If you have done everything right so far, you should have the year in which Napoleon was banished to Elba and the metronome was invented, neither event, however, discussed in this book.

Add the gestation period of an opossum expressed in days. That isn’t in the book, either, so I make you a gift of it. The number is 12. That will bring you to the year in which Thomas Jefferson, the former slave owner, died and James Fenimore Cooper published The Last of the Mohicans, which wasn’t set in this valley but might as well have been.

Divide by the square root of 4.

Subtract 100 times 9.

Add the greatest number of children known to have come from the womb of just 1 woman, and there you are, by gosh.

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.

END