Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

Dwayne heard a tired voice from somewhere behind his head, even though no one was back there. It said this to Dwayne: “Oh my, oh my.”

Dwayne’s bad chemicals now made him put his car in gear. He drove out of the vacant lot, proceeded sedately down Union Avenue, which paralleled the Interstate.

He went past his principal place of business, which was Dwayne Hoover’s Exit Eleven Pontiac Village, and he turned into the parking lot of the new Holiday Inn next door. Dwayne owned a third of the Inn—in partnership with Midland City’s leading orthodontist, Dr. Alfred Maritimo, and Bill Miller, who was Chairman of the Parole Board at the Adult Correctional Institution at Shepherdstown, among other things.

Dwayne went up the Inn’s back steps to the roof without meeting anybody. There was a full moon. There were two full moons. The new Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts was a translucent sphere on stilts, and it was illuminated from the inside now—and it looked like a moon.

Dwayne gazed over the sleeping city. He had been born there. He had spent the first three years of his life in an orphanage only two miles from where he stood. He had been adopted and educated there.

He owned not only the Pontiac agency and a piece of the new Holiday Inn. He owned three Burger Chefs, too, and five coin-operated car

washes, and pieces of the Sugar Creek Drive-In Theatre, Radio Station WMCY, the Three Maples Par-Three Golf Course, and seventeen hundred shares of common stock in Barrytron, Limited, a local electronics firm. He owned dozens of vacant lots. He was on the Board of Directors of the Midland County National Bank.

But now Midland City looked unfamiliar and frightening to Dwayne. “Where am I?” he said.

He even forgot that his wife Celia had committed suicide, for instance, by eating Drano—a mixture of sodium hydroxide and aluminum flakes, which was meant to clear drains. Celia became a small volcano, since she was composed of the same sorts of substances which commonly clogged drains.

Dwayne even forgot that his only child, a son, had grown up to be a notorious homosexual. His name was George, but everybody called him “Bunny.” He played piano in the cocktail lounge of the new Holiday Inn.

“Where am I?” said Dwayne.

Kilgore Trout took a leak in the men’s room of the New York City movie house. There was a sign on the wall next to the roller towel. It advertised a massage parlor called The Sultan’s Harem. Massage parlors were something new and exciting in New York. Men could go in there and photograph naked women, or they could paint the women’s naked bodies with water-soluble paints. Men could be rubbed all over by a woman until their penises squirted jism into Turkish towels.

“It’s a full life and a merry one,” said Kilgore Trout.

There was a message written in pencil on the tiles by the roller towel. This was it:

Trout plundered his pockets for a pen or pencil. He had an answer to the question. But he had nothing to write with, not even a burnt match. So he left the question unanswered, but here is what he would have written, if he had found anything to write with:

When Trout headed back for his seat in the theater, he played at being the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe. He sent messages by telepathy to the Creator, wherever He was. He reported that the men’s room had been clean as a whistle. “The carpeting under my feet,” he signaled from the lobby, “is springy and new. I think it must be some miracle fiber. It’s blue. You know what I mean by blue?” And so on.

When he got to the auditorium itself, the house lights were on. Nobody was there but the manager, who was also the ticket-taker and the bouncer and the janitor. He was sweeping filth from between the seats. He was a middle-aged white man. “No more fun tonight, grandfather,” he said to Trout. “Time to go home.”

Trout didn’t protest. Neither did he leave immediately. He examined a green enameled steel box in the back of the auditorium. It contained the projector and the sound system and the films. There was a wire that led from the box to a plug in the wall. There was a hole in the front of the box. That was how the pictures got out. On the side of the box was a simple switch. It looked like this:

It intrigued Trout to know that he had only to flick the switch, and the people would start fucking and sucking again.

“Good night, Grandfather,” said the manager pointedly.

Trout took his leave of the machine reluctantly. He said this about it to the manager: “It fills such a need, this machine, and it’s so easy to operate.”

As Trout departed, he sent this telepathic message to the Creator of the Universe, serving as His eyes and ears and conscience: “Am headed for Forty-second Street now. How much do you already know about Forty-second Street?”

Trout wandered out onto the sidewalk of Forty-second Street. It was a dangerous place to be. The whole city was dangerous—because of chemicals and the uneven distribution of wealth and so on. A lot of people were like Dwayne: they created chemicals in their own bodies which were bad for their heads. But there were thousands upon thousands of other people in the city who bought bad chemicals and ate them or sniffed them—or injected them into their veins with devices which looked like this:

Sometimes they even stuffed bad chemicals up their assholes. Their assholes looked like this:

People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in

ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn’t own doodley-squat, so they couldn’t improve their surroundings. So they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.

The results had been catastrophic so far—suicide, theft, murder, and insanity and so on. But new chemicals were coming onto the market all the time. Twenty feet away from Trout there on Forty-second Street, a fourteen-year-old white boy lay unconscious in the doorway of a pornography store. He had swallowed a half pint of a new type of paint remover which had gone on sale for the first time only the day before. He had also swallowed two pills which were intended to prevent contagious abortion in cattle, which was called Bang’s disease.

Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.

The theater manager came out and locked the door behind him.

And two young black prostitutes materialized from nowhere. They asked Trout and the manager if they would like to have some fun.

They were cheerful and unafraid—because of a tube of Norwegian hemorrhoid remedy which they had eaten about half an hour before. The manufacturer had never intended the stuff to be eaten. People were supposed to squirt it up their assholes.