Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions

The emergency room of the hospital was in the basement. After Kilgore Trout had the stump of his ring finger disinfected and trimmed and bandaged, he was told to go upstairs to the finance office. There were certain forms he had to fill out, since he was from outside Midland County, had no health insurance, and was destitute. He had no checkbook. He had no cash.

He got lost in the basement for a little while, as a lot of people did. He found the double doors to the morgue, as a lot of people did. He automatically mooned about his own mortality, as a lot of people did. He found an x-ray room, which wasn’t in use. It made him wonder automatically if anything bad was growing inside himself. Other people had wondered exactly the same thing when they passed that room.

Trout felt nothing now that millions of other people wouldn’t have felt—automatically.

And Trout found stairs, but they were the wrong stairs. They led him not to the lobby and the finance office and the gift shop and all that, but into a matrix of rooms where persons were recovering or failing to recover from injuries of all kinds. Many of the people there had been flung to the earth by the force of gravity, which never relaxed for a second.

Trout passed a very expensive private room now, and there was a young black man in there, with a white telephone and a color television set and boxes of candy and bouquets of flowers all around. He was Elgin Washington, a pimp who operated out of the old Holiday Inn. He was only twenty-six years old, but he was fabulously well-to-do.

Visiting hours had ended, so all his female sex slaves had departed. But they had left clouds of perfume behind. Trout gagged as he passed the door. It was an automatic reaction to the fundamentally unfriendly cloud. Elgin Washington had just sniffed cocaine into his sinus passages, which amplified tremendously the telepathic messages he sent and received. He felt one hundred times bigger than life, because the messages were so loud and exciting. It was their noise that thrilled him. He didn’t care what they said.

And, in the midst of the uproar, Elgin Washington said something wheedlingly to Trout. “Hey man, hey man, hey man,” he wheedled. He had had his foot amputated earlier in the day by Khashdrahr Miasma, but he had forgotten that. “Hey man, hey man,” he coaxed. He wanted nothing particular from Trout. Some part of his mind was idly exercising his skill at making strangers come to him. He was a fisherman for men’s souls. “Hey man—” he said. He showed a gold tooth. He winked an eye.

Trout came to the foot of the black man’s bed. This wasn’t compassion on his part. He was being machinery again. Trout was, like so many Earthlings, a fully automatic boob when a pathological personality like Elgin Washington told him what to want, what to do. Both men, incidentally, were descendants of the Emperor Charlemagne. Anybody with any European blood in him was a descendant of the Emperor Charlemagne.

Elgin Washington perceived that he had caught yet another human being without really meaning to. It was not in his nature to let one go without making him feel in some way diminished, in some way a fool. Sometimes he actually killed a man in order to diminish him, but he was gentle with Trout. He closed his eyes as though thinking hard, then he earnestly said, “I think I may be dying.”

“I’ll get a nurse!” said Trout. Any human being would have said exactly the same thing.

“No, no,” said Elgin Washington, waving his hands in dreamy protest. “I’m dying slow. It’s gradual.”

“I see,” said Trout.

“You got to do me a favor,” said Washington. He had no idea what favor to ask. It would come to him. Ideas for favors always came.

“What favor?” said Trout uneasily. He stiffened at the mention of an unspecified favor. He was that kind of a machine. Washington knew he would stiffen. Every human being was that kind of a machine.

“I want you to listen to me while I whistle the song of the Nightingale,” he said. He commanded Trout to be silent by giving him the evil eye.

“What adds peculiar beauty to the call of the Nightingale, much beloved by poets," he said, “is the fact that it will only sing by moonlight." Then he did what almost every black person in Midland City would do: He imitated a Nightingale.

The Midland City Festival of the Arts was postponed because of madness. Fred T. Barry, its chairman, came to the hospital in his limousine, dressed like a Chinaman, to offer his sympathy to Beatrice Keedsler and Kilgore Trout. Trout could not be found anywhere. Beatrice Keedsler had been put to sleep with morphine.

Kilgore Trout assumed that the Arts Festival would still take place that night. He had no money for any form of transportation, so he set out on foot. He began the five mile walk down Fairchild Boulevard— toward a tiny amber dot at the other end. The dot was the Midland City Center for the Arts. He would make it grow by walking toward it. When his walking had made it big enough, it would swallow him up. There would be food inside.

I was waiting to intercept him, about six blocks away. I sat in a Plymouth Duster I had rented from Avis with my Diners’ Club card, I had a paper tube in my mouth. It was stuffed with leaves. I set it on fire. It was a soigne thing to do.

My penis was three inches long and five inches in diameter. Its diameter was a world’s record as far as I knew. It slumbered now in my Jockey Shorts. And I got out of the car to stretch my legs, which was another soigne thing to do. I was among factories and warehouses. The streetlights were widely-spaced and feeble. Parking lots were vacant, except for night watchmen’s cars which were here and there. There was no traffic on Fairchild Boulevard, which had once been the aorta of the town. The life had all been drained out of it by the Interstate and by the Robert F. Kennedy Inner Belt Expressway, which was built on the old right-of-way of the Monon Railroad. The Monon was defunct.

Defunct.

Nobody slept in that part of town. Nobody lurked there. It was a system of forts at night, with high fences and alarms, and with prowling dogs. They were killing machines.

When I got out of my Plymouth Duster, I feared nothing. That was foolish of me. A writer off-guard, since the materials with which he works are so dangerous, can expect agony as quick as a thunderclap.

I was about to be attacked by a Doberman pinscher. He was a leading character in an earlier version of this book.

Listen: That Doberman’s name was Kazak. He patrolled the supply yard of the Maritimo Brothers Construction Company at night.

Kazak’s trainers, the people who explained to him what sort of a planet he was on and what sort of an animal he was, taught him that the Creator of the Universe wanted him to kill anything he could catch, and to eat it, too.

In an earlier version of this book, I had Benjamin Davis, the black husband of Lottie Davis, Dwayne Hoover’s maid, take care of Kazak. He threw raw meat down into the pit where Kazak lived in the daytime. He dragged Kazak into the pit at sunrise. He screamed at him and threw tennis balls at him at sundown. Then he turned him loose.

Benjamin Davis was first trumpet with the Midland City Symphony Orchestra, but he got no pay for that, so he needed a real job. He wore a thick gown made of war-surplus mattresses and chicken wire, so Kazak could not kill him. Kazak tried and tried. There were chunks of mattress and swatches of chicken wire all over the yard.

And Kazak did his best to kill anybody who came too close to the fence which enclosed his planet. He leaped at people as though the fence weren’t there. The fence bellied out toward the sidewalk everywhere. It looked as though somebody had been shooting cannonballs at it from inside.