Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

Trout simply walked away from the desk and sat down on a brocaded Spanish-style settee. The entire lobby, except for the vending machines, was done in Spanish style.

Milo now used a line from a television show which had been popular a few years back. The show wasn’t on the air anymore, but most people still remembered the line. Much of the conversation in the country consisted of lines from television shows, both present and past. The show Milo’s line was from consisted of taking some old person, usually fairly famous, into what looked like an ordinary room, only it was actually a stage, with an audience out front and television cameras hidden all around. There were also people who had known

the person in the older days hidden around. They would come out and tell anecdotes about the person later on.

Milo now said what the master of ceremonies would have said to Trout, if Trout had been on the show and the curtain was going up: “Kilgore Trout! This is your life!”

Only there wasn’t any audience or curtain or any of that. And the truth was that Milo Maritimo was the only person in Midland City who knew anything about Kilgore Trout. It was wishful thinking on his part that the upper crust of Midland City was about to be as ga-ga as he was about the works of Kilgore Trout.

“We are so ready for a Renaissance, Mr. Trout! You will be our Leonardo!”

“How could you possibly have heard of me?” said Trout dazedly.

“In getting ready for the Midland City Renaissance,” said Milo, “I made it my business to read everything I could by and about every artist who was on his way here.”

“There isn’t anything by me or about me anywhere,” protested Trout.

Milo came from behind his desk. He brought with him what appeared to be a lopsided old softball, swaddled in many different sorts of tape. “When I couldn’t find out anything about you,” he said, “I wrote to Eliot Rosewater, the man who said we had to bring you here. He has a private collection of forty-one of your novels and sixty-three of your short stories, Mr. Trout. He let me read them all.” He held out the seeming baseball, which was actually a book from Rosewater’s collection. Rosewater used his science-fiction library hard. “This is the only book I haven’t finished, and I’ll finish it before the sun comes up tomorrow,” said Milo.

The novel in question, incidentally, was The Smart Bunny. The leading character was a rabbit who lived like all the other wild rabbits, but who was as intelligent as Albert Einstein or William Shakespeare. It was a female rabbit. She was the only female leading character in any novel or story by Kilgore Trout.

She led a normal female rabbit’s life, despite her ballooning intellect. She concluded that her mind was useless, that it was a sort of tumor, that it had no usefulness within the rabbit scheme of things.

So she went hippity-hop, hippity-hop toward the city, to have the tumor removed. But a hunter named Dudley Farrow shot and killed her before she got there. Farrow skinned her and took out her guts, but then he and his wife Grace decided that they had better not eat her because of her unusually large head. They thought what she had thought when she was alive—that she must be diseased.

And so on.

Kilgore Trout had to change into his only other garments, his high school tuxedo and his new evening shirt and all, right away. The lower parts of his rolled-up trousers had become impregnated with the plastic substance from the creek, so he couldn’t roll them down again. They were as stiff as flanges on sewer pipes.

So Milo Maritimo showed him to his suite, which was two ordinary Holiday Inn rooms with a door between them open. Trout and every distinguished visitor had a suite, with two color television sets, two tile baths, four double beds equipped with Magic Fingers. Magic Fingers were electric vibrators attached to the mattress springs of a bed. If a guest put a quarter into a little box on his bedside table, the Magic Fingers would jiggle his bed.

There were enough flowers in Trout’s room for a Catholic gangster’s funeral. They were from Fred T. Barry, the Chairman of the Arts Festival, and from the Midland City Association of Women’s Clubs, and from the Chamber of Commerce, and on and on.

Trout read a few of the cards on the flowers, and he commented, “The town certainly seems to be getting behind the arts in a great big way.”

Milo closed his olive eyes tight, wincing with a tangy agony. “It’s time. Oh God, Mr. Trout, we were starving for so long, without even knowing what we were hungering for,” he said. This young man was not only a descendant of master criminals, he was a close relative of felons operating in Midland City at the present time. The partners in the Maritimo Brothers Construction Company, for instance, were his uncles. Gino Maritimo, Milo’s first cousin once removed, was the dope king of the city.

“Oh, Mr. Trout,” nice Milo went on, there in Trout’s suite, “teach us to sing and dance and laugh and cry. We’ve tried to survive so long on money and sex and envy and real estate and football and

basketball and automobiles and television and alcohol—on sawdust and broken glass!”

“Open your eyes!” said Trout bitterly. “Do I look like a dancer, a singer, a man of joy?” He was wearing his tuxedo now. It was a size too large for him. He had lost much weight since high school. His pockets were crammed with mothballs. They bulged like saddlebags.

“Open your eyes!” said Trout. “Would a man nourished by beauty look like this? You have nothing but desolation and desperation here, you say? I bring you more of the same!”

“My eyes are open,” said Milo warmly, “and I see exactly what I expect to see. I see a man who is terribly wounded—because he has dared to pass through the fires of truth to the other side, which we have never seen. And then he has come back again—to tell us about the other side.”

And I sat there in the new Holiday Inn, and made it disappear, then appear again, then disappear, then appear again. Actually, there was nothing but a big open field there. A farmer had put it into rye.

It was high time, I thought, for Trout to meet Dwayne Hoover, for Dwayne to run amok.

I knew how this book would end. Dwayne would hurt a lot of people. He would bite off one joint of the right index finger of Kilgore Trout.

And then Trout, with his wound dressed, would walk out into the unfamiliar city. He would meet his Creator, who would explain everything.

Kilgore Trout entered the cocktail lounge. His feet were fiery hot. They were encased not only in shoes and socks, but in clear plastic, too. They could not sweat, they could not breathe.

Rabo Karabekian and Beatrice Keedsler did not see him come in.

They were surrounded by new affectionate friends at the piano bar. Karabekian’s speech had been splendidly received. Everybody agreed now that Midland City had one of the greatest paintings in the world.

“All you had to do was explain,” said Bonnie MacMahon. “I understand now.”

“I didn’t think there was anything to explain,” said Carlo Maritino, the builder, wonderingly. “But there was, by God.”

Abe Cohen, the jeweler, said to Karabekian, “If artists would explain more, people would like art more. You realize that?”

And so on.

Trout was feeling spooky. He thought maybe a lot of people were going to greet him as effusively as Milo Maritimo had done, and he had had no experience with celebrations like that. But nobody got in his way.

His old friend Anonymity was by his side again, and the two of them chose a table near Dwayne Hoover and me. All he could see of me was the reflection of candle flames in my mirrored glasses, in my leaks.