Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

“Why did he name his company Pyramid?" asked Trout. “I mean—this thing can go a hundred miles an hour, if it has to. It’s fast and useful and unornamental. It’s as up-to-date as a rocket ship. I never saw anything that was less like a pyramid than this truck.”

A pyramid was a sort of huge stone tomb which Egyptians had built thousands and thousands of years before. The Egyptians didn’t build them anymore. The tombs looked like this, and tourists would come from far away to gaze at them:

“Why would anybody in the business of highspeed transportation name his business and his trucks after buildings which haven’t moved an eighth of an inch since Christ was born?”

The driver’s answer was prompt. It was peevish, too, as though he thought Trout was stupid to have to ask a question like that. “He liked the sound of it,” he said. “Don’t you like the sound of it?”

Trout nodded in order to keep things friendly. “Yes,” he said, “it’s a very nice sound.”

Trout sat back and thought about the conversation. He shaped it into a story, which he never got around to writing until he was an old, old man. It was about a planet where the language kept turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted by sounds. Words became musical notes. Sentences became melodies. They were useless as conveyors of information, because nobody knew or cared what the meanings of words were anymore.

So leaders in government and commerce, in order to function, had to invent new and much uglier vocabularies and sentence structures all the time, which would resist being transmuted to music.

“You married, Kilgore?” the driver asked.

“Three times,” said Trout. It was true. Not only that, but each of his wives had been extraordinarily patient and loving and beautiful. Each had been shriveled by his pessimism.

“Any kids?”

“One,” said Trout. Somewhere in the past, tumbling among all the wives and stories lost in the mails was a son named Leo. “He’s a man now,” said Trout.

Leo left home forever at the age of fourteen. He lied about his age, and he joined the Marines. He sent a note to his father from boot camp. It said this: “I pity you. You’ve crawled up your own asshole and died.”

That was the last Trout heard from Leo, directly or indirectly, until he was visited by two agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Leo had deserted from his division in Viet Nam, they said. He had committed high treason. He had joined the Viet Cong.

Here was the F.B.I. evaluation of Leo’s situation on the planet at that time: “Your boy’s in bad trouble,” they said.

When Dwayne Hoover saw Harry LeSabre, his sales manager, in leaf- green leotards and a grass skirt and all that, he could not believe it. So he made himself not see it. He went into his office, which was also cluttered with ukuleles and pineapples.

Francine Pefko, his secretary, looked normal, except that she had a rope of flowers around her neck and a flower behind one ear. She smiled. This was a war widow with lips like sofa pillows and bright red hair. She adored Dwayne. She adored Hawaiian Week, too.

“Aloha,” she said.

Harry LeSabre, meanwhile, had been destroyed by Dwayne.

When Harry presented himself to Dwayne so ridiculously, every molecule in his body awaited Dwayne’s reaction. Each molecule ceased its business for a moment, put some distance between itself and its neighbors. Each molecule waited to learn whether its galaxy, which was called Harry LeSabre, would or would not be dissolved.

When Dwayne treated Harry as though he were invisible, Harry thought he had revealed himself as a revolting transvestite, and that he was fired on that account.

Harry closed his eyes. He never wanted to open them again. His heart sent this message to his molecules: “For reasons obvious to us all, this galaxy is dissolved !”

Dwayne didn’t know anything about that. He leaned on Francine Pefko’s desk. He came close to telling her how sick he was. He

warned her: “This is a very tough day, for some reason. So no jokes, no surprises. Keep everything simple. Keep anybody the least bit nutty out of here. No telephone calls.”

Francine told Dwayne that the twins were waiting for him in the inner office. “Something bad is happening to the cave, I think,” she told him.

Dwayne was grateful for a message that simple and clear. The twins were his younger stepbrothers, Lyle and Kyle Hoover. The cave was Sacred Miracle Cave, a tourist trap just south of Shepherdstown, which Dwayne owned in partnership with Lyle and Kyle. It was the sole source of income for Lyle and Kyle, who lived in identical yellow ranch houses on either side of the gift shop which sheltered the entrance to the cave.

All over the State, nailed to trees and fence posts, were arrow-shaped signs, which pointed in the direction of the cave and said how far away it was—for example:

Before Dwayne entered his inner office, he read one of many comical signs which Francine had put up on the wall in order to amuse people, to remind them of what they so easily forgot: that people didn’t have to be serious all the time.

Here was the text of the sign Dwayne read:

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO WORK HERE, BUT IT SURE HELPS!

There was a picture of a crazy person to go with the text. This was it:

Francine wore a button on her bosom which showed a creature in a healthier, more enviable frame of mind. This was the button:

Lyle and Kyle sat side-by-side on the black leather couch in Dwayne Hoover’s inner office. They looked so much alike that Dwayne had not been able to tell them apart until 1954, when Lyle got in a fight over a woman at the Roller Derby. After that, Lyle was the one with the broken nose. As babies in crib, Dwayne remembered now, they used to suck each other’s thumbs.

Here is how Dwayne happened to have stepbrothers, incidentally, even though he had been adopted by people who couldn’t have children of their own. Their adopting him triggered something to their bodies which made it possible for them to have children after all. This

was a common phenomenon. A lot of couples seemed to be programmed that way.

Dwayne was so glad to see them now—these two little men in overalls and work shoes, each wearing a pork-pie hat. They were familiar, they were real. Dwayne closed his door on the chaos outside. “All right—” he said, “what’s happened at the cave?”

Ever since Lyle had had his nose broken, the twins agreed that Lyle should do the talking for the two. Kyle hadn’t said a thousand words since 1954.

“Them bubbles is halfway up to the Cathedral now,” said Lyle. “The way they’re coming, they’ll be up to Moby Dick in a week or two.”

Dwayne understood him perfectly. The underground stream which passed through the bowels of Sacred Miracle Cave was polluted by some sort of industrial waste which formed bubbles as tough as ping- pong balls. These bubbles were shouldering one another up a passage which led to a big boulder which had been painted white to resemble Moby Dick, the Great White Whale. The bubbles would soon engulf Moby Dick and invade the Cathedral of Whispers, which was the main attraction at the cave. Thousands of people had been married in the Cathedral of Whispers —including Dwayne and Lyle and Kyle. Harry LeSabre, too.