Breakfast of Champions

Book Jacket

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SUMMARY: Breakfast Of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result is murderously funny satire as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.

BREAKFAST OF

CHAMPIONS

With Drawings By The Author

KURT VONNEGUT

Copyright

Breakfast of Champions

Copyright © 1973 by Kurt Vonnegut

Cover art and e-Foreword to the electronic edition copyright© 2000 by

RosettaBooks, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any

manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief

quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For information address Editor@RosettaBooks.com

First electronic edition published 2000 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.

ISBN 0-7953-0241-X

Breakfast of Champions

2

Contents

eForeword

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

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Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

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eForeword

“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane” — so

reads the epitaph for Kilgore Trout, who is one of several alter egos of

the author Kurt Vonnegut in his explosively funny and ironic 1973 novel

Breakfast of Champions. The world Vonnegut explores is not a healthy

one — as the title suggests, it is the United States of America in the age

of Vietnam, Nixon and the Silent Majority — but it is desperately trying

to seem so. An obscure science fiction writer takes a wild road trip to

the middle of the Midwest, where his fate becomes intertwined with that

of a successful car dealer who is slowly going mad. Vonnegut takes

this opportunity to question a number of assumptions, including the very

nature of the novel he is writing. A tour de force of imagination and

scathing insight, Breakfast of Champions is one of the most discussed

and widely read American novels of the late 20th century.

The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut (b. 1922) occupies an unusual but

enduring place in modern American fiction, that of the prolific, critically

acclaimed writer whose work has also enjoyed enormous popularity and

inspired a virtual cult following. Vonnegut’s first work appeared in the

early 1950s, and few writers have captured the modern age as

consistently and as imaginatively as he has. Often blending satire with

science fiction, Vonnegut’s writing reflects an acute sense of the ironies in

modern American life. Nowhere is his richly ambivalent feeling about the

contemporary American scene more brilliantly realized than in Breakfast

of Champions , published just after Vonnegut’s 50th birthday, ending a

four-year hiatus that followed appearance of Slaughterhouse Five.

RosettaBooks is the leading publisher dedicated exclusively to

electronic editions of great works of fiction and non-fiction that reflect

Breakfast of Champions

5

our world. RosettaBooks is a committed e-publisher, maximizing the

resources of the World Wide Web in opening a fresh dimension in the

reading experience. In this electronic environment for reading, each

RosettaBook will enhance the experience through The RosettaBooks

Connection. This gateway instantly delivers to the reader the

opportunity to learn more about the title, the author, the content and

the context of each work, using the full resources of the Web.

Other Vonnegut titles available from RosettaBooks include

Slaughterhouse Five, CatÕs Cradle, The Sirens of Titan and Player Piano.

To experience The RosettaBooks Connection for Breakfast of

Champions, go to:

RosettaBooks.com/BreakfastOfChampions

In Memory of Phoebe Hurty, who comforted me in

Indianapolis—during the Great Depression.

When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.

–Job

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Preface

The expression “Breakfast of Champions” is a registered trademark of

General Mills, Inc., for use on a breakfast cereal product. The use of

the identical expression as the title for this book is not intended to

indicate an association with or sponsorship by General Mills, nor is it

intended to disparage their fine products.

The person to whom this book is dedicated, Phoebe Hurty, is no

longer among the living, as they say. She was an Indianapolis widow

when I met her late in the Great Depression. I was sixteen or so. She

was about forty.

She was rich, but she had gone to work every weekday of her adult

life, so she went on doing that. She wrote a sane and funny advice-tothe-lovelorn column for the Indianapolis Times, a good paper which is

now defunct.

Defunct.

She wrote ads for the William H. Block Company, a department store

which still flourishes in a building my father designed. She wrote this

ad for an end-of-the-summer sale on straw hats: “For prices like this,

you can run them through your horse and put them on your roses.”

Phoebe Hurty hired me to write copy for ads about teenage clothes. I

had to wear the clothes I praised. That was part of the job. And I

became friends with her two sons, who were my age. I was over at

their house all the time.

She would talk bawdily to me and her sons, and to our girlfriends

when we brought them around. She was funny. She was liberating.

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She taught us to be impolite in conversation not only about sexual

matters, but about American history and famous heroes, about the

distribution of wealth, about school, about everything.

I now make my living by being impolite. I am clumsy at it. I keep trying

to imitate the impoliteness which was so graceful in Phoebe Hurty. I

think now that grace was easier for her than it is for me because of the

mood of the Great Depression. She believed what so many Americans

believed then: that the nation would be happy and just and rational

when prosperity came.

I never hear that word anymore: Prosperity. It used to be a synonym for

Paradise. And Phoebe Hurty was able to believe that the impoliteness

she recommended would give shape to an American paradise.

Now her sort of impoliteness is fashionable. But nobody believes

anymore in a new American paradise. I sure miss Phoebe Hurty.

As for the suspicion I express in this book, that human beings are

robots, are machines: It should be noted that people, mostly men,

suffering from the last stages of syphilis, from locomotor ataxia, were

common spectacles in downtown Indianapolis and in circus crowds

when I was a boy.

Those people were infested with carnivorous little corkscrews which

could be seen only with a microscope. The victims’ vertebrae were

welded together after the corkscrews got through with the meat

between. The syphilitics seemed tremendously dignified—erect, eyes

straight ahead.

I saw one stand on a curb at the corner of Meridian and Washington

streets one time, underneath an overhanging clock which my father

designed. The intersection was known locally as “The Crossroads

of America.”

This syphilitic man was thinking hard there, at the Crossroads of

America, about how to get his legs to step off the curb and carry him

across Washington Street. He shuddered gently, as though he had a

small motor which was idling inside. Here was his problem: his brains,

where the instructions to his legs originated, were being eaten alive by

corkscrews. The wires which had to carry the instructions weren’t

insulated anymore, or were eaten clear through. Switches along the

way were welded open or shut.

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This man looked like an old, old man, although he might have been

only thirty years old. He thought and thought. And then he kicked two

times like a chorus girl.

He certainly looked like a machine to me when I was a boy.

I tend to think of human beings as huge, rubbery test tubes, too, with

chemical reactions seething inside. When I was a boy, I saw a lot of

people with goiters. So did Dwayne Hoover, the Pontiac dealer who is

the hero of this book. Those unhappy Earthlings had such swollen

thyroid glands that they seemed to have zucchini squash growing from

their throats.

All they had to do in order to have ordinary lives, it turned out, was to

consume less than one-millionth of an ounce of iodine every day.

My own mother wrecked her brains with chemicals, which were

supposed to make her sleep.

When I get depressed, I take a little pill, and I cheer up again.

And so on.

So it is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel,

to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of

microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that

particular day.

What do I myself think of this particular book? I feel lousy about it, but

I always feel lousy about my books. My friend Knox Burger said one

time that a certain cumbersome novel “. . . read as though it had been

written by Philboyd Studge.” That’s who I think I am when I write what

I am seemingly programmed to write.

This book is my fiftieth-birthday present to myself. I feel as though I

am crossing the spine of a roof—having ascended one slope.

I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly—to insult “The StarSpangled Banner,” to scrawl pictures of a Nazi flag and an asshole and

a lot of other things with a felt-tipped pen. To give an idea of the maturity

of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole:

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I think I am trying to clear my head of all the junk in there—the

assholes, the flags, the underpants. Yes—there is a picture in this

book of underpants. I’m throwing out characters from my other books,

too. I’m not going to put on any more puppet shows.

I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was

born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago.

I suspect that this is something most white Americans, and nonwhite

Americans who imitate white Americans, should do. The things other

people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely,

are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are

out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.

I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can’t live

without a culture anymore.

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over

my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen

hundred and twenty-two.

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh,

accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day.

When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the

people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were

silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice

Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that

millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one

another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that

minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden

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silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men

who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred.

Veterans’ Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will

keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

—PHILBOYD STUDGE

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Chapter 1

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white

men on a planet which was dying fast.

One of them was a science-fiction writer named Kilgore Trout. He was

a nobody at the time, and he supposed his life was over. He was

mistaken. As a consequence of the meeting, he became one of the

most beloved and respected human beings in history.

The man he met was an automobile dealer, a Pontiac dealer named

Dwayne Hoover. Dwayne Hoover was on the brink of going insane.

Listen:

Trout and Hoover were citizens of the United States of America, a

country which was called America for short. This was their national

anthem, which was pure balderdash, like so much they were expected

to take seriously:

O, say can you see by the dawn’s early light

What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,

Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thru the perilous fight

O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?

And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,

Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.

O, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

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There were one quadrillion nations in the Universe, but the nation

Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout belonged to was the only one with

a national anthem which was gibberish sprinkled with question marks.

Here is what their flag looked like:

It was the law of their nation, a law no other nation on the planet had

about its flag, which said this: “The flag shall not be dipped to any

person or thing.”

Flag-dipping was a form of friendly and respectful salute, which

consisted of bringing the flag on a stick closer to the ground, then

raising it up again.

The motto of Dwayne Hoover’s and Kilgore Trout’s nation was this,

which meant in a language nobody spoke anymore, Out of Many,

One: “E pluribus unum.”

The undippable flag was a beauty, and the anthem and the vacant

motto might not have mattered much, if it weren’t for this: a lot of

citizens were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought

they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong planet, that

some terrible mistake had been made. It might have comforted them

some if their anthem and their motto had mentioned fairness or

brotherhood or hope or happiness, had somehow welcomed them to

the society and its real estate.

If they studied their paper money for clues as to what their country

was all about, they found, among a lot of other baroque trash, a

picture of a truncated pyramid with a radiant eye on top of it, like this:

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Not even the President of the United States knew what that was all

about. It was as though the country were saying to its citizens, “In

nonsense is strength.”

A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the

part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and

Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show

off their useless education, which consisted of the study of hocuspocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well.

But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes.

For example, teachers of children in the United States of America

wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the

children to memorize it with pride and joy:

The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was

discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were

already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That

was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and

kill them.

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Here was another piece of evil nonsense which children were taught:

that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a

beacon of freedom to human beings everywhere else. There were

pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to

see. It was sort of an ice-cream cone on fire. It looked like this:

Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of

the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings

for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was

so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of

ordinary human beings as machines.

The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the

continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery

was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black.

Color was everything.

Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from

anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were

meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which was a

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mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched this

seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas.

This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The

projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could

wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human

being, even when he was far, far away.

The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to

astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how

heartless and greedy they were.

When Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout met each other, their country

was by far the richest and most powerful country on the planet. It had

most of the food and minerals and machinery, and it disciplined other

countries by threatening to shoot big rockets at them or to drop things

on them from airplanes.

Most other countries didn’t have doodley-squat. Many of them weren’t

even inhabitable anymore. They had too many people and not

enough space. They had sold everything that was any good, and

there wasn’t anything to eat anymore, and still the people went on

fucking all the time.

Fucking was how babies were made.

A lot of the people on the wrecked planet were Communists. They had

a theory that what was left of the planet should be shared more or less

equally among all the people, who hadn’t asked to come to a wrecked

planet in the first place. Meanwhile, more babies were arriving all the

time—kicking and screaming, yelling for milk.

In some places people would actually try to eat mud or such on gravel

while babies were being born just a few feet away.

And so on.

Dwayne Hoover’s and Kilgore Trout’s country, where there was still

plenty of everything, was opposed to Communism. It didn’t think that

Earthlings who had a lot should share it with others unless they really

wanted to, and most of them didn’t want to.

So they didn’t have to.

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Everybody in America was supposed to grab whatever he could and

hold on to it. Some Americans were very good at grabbing and

holding, were fabulously well-to-do. Others couldn’t get their hands

on doodley-squat.

Dwayne Hoover was fabulously well-to-do when he met Kilgore Trout.

A man whispered those exact words to a friend one morning as

Dwayne walked by: “Fabulously well-to-do.”

And here’s how much of the planet Kilgore Trout owned in those days:

doodley-squat.

And Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover met in Midland City, which was

Dwayne’s home town, during an Arts Festival there in autumn of 1972.

As has already been said: Dwayne was a Pontiac dealer who was

going insane.

Dwayne’s incipient insanity was mainly a matter of chemicals, of

course. Dwayne Hoover’s body was manufacturing certain chemicals

which unbalanced his mind. But Dwayne, like all novice lunatics,

needed some bad ideas, too, so that his craziness could have shape

and direction.

Bad chemicals and bad ideas were the Yin and Yang of madness. Yin

and Yang were Chinese symbols of harmony. They looked like this:

The bad ideas were delivered to Dwayne by Kilgore Trout. Trout

considered himself not only harmless but invisible. The world had paid

so little attention to him that he supposed he was dead.

He hoped he was dead.

But he learned from his encounter with Dwayne that he was alive

enough to give a fellow human being ideas which would turn him into

a monster.

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Here was the core of the bad ideas which Trout gave to Dwayne:

Everybody on Earth was a robot, with one exception—Dwayne Hoover.

Of all the creatures in the Universe, only Dwayne was thinking and

feeling and worrying and planning and so on. Nobody else knew what

pain was. Nobody else had any choices to make. Everybody else was

a fully automatic machine, whose purpose was to stimulate Dwayne.

Dwayne was a new type of creature being tested by the Creator of

the Universe.

Only Dwayne Hoover had free will.

Trout did not expect to be believed. He put the bad ideas into a

science-fiction novel, and that was where Dwayne found them. The

book wasn’t addressed to Dwayne alone. Trout had never heard of

Dwayne when he wrote it. It was addressed to anybody who

happened to open it up. It said to simply anybody, in effect, “Hey—

guess what: You’re the only creature with free will. How does that

make you feel?” And so on.

It was a tour de force. It was a jeu d’esprit.

But it was mind poison to Dwayne.

It shook up Trout to realize that even he could bring evil into the

world—in the form of bad ideas. And, after Dwayne was carted off to a

lunatic asylum in a canvas camisole, Trout became a fanatic on the

importance of ideas as causes and cures for diseases.

But nobody would listen to him. He was a dirty old man in the

wilderness, crying out among the trees and underbrush, “Ideas or the

lack of them can cause disease!”

Kilgore Trout became a pioneer in the field of mental health. He

advanced his theories disguised as science-fiction. He died in 1981,

almost twenty years after he made Dwayne Hoover so sick.

He was by then recognized as a great artist and scientist. The

American Academy of Arts and Sciences caused a monument to be

erected over his ashes. Carved in its face was a quotation from his

last novel, his two-hundred-and-ninth novel, which was unfinished

when he died. The monument looked like this:

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Chapter 2

Dwayne was a widower. He lived alone at night in a dream house in

Fairchild Heights, which was the most desirable residential area in the

city. Every house there cost at least one hundred thousand dollars to

build. Every house was on at least four acres of land.

Dwayne’s only companion at night was a Labrador retriever named

Sparky. Sparky could not wag his tail—because of an automobile

accident many years ago, so he had no way of telling other dogs how

friendly he was. He had to fight all the time. His ears were in tatters.

He was lumpy with scars.

Dwayne had a black servant named Lottie Davis. She cleaned his

house every day. Then she cooked his supper for him and served it.

Then she went home. She was descended from slaves.

Lottie Davis and Dwayne didn’t talk much, even though they liked

each other a lot. Dwayne reserved most of his conversation for the

dog. He would get down on the floor and roll around with Sparky, and

he would say things like, “You and me, Spark,” and “How’s my old

buddy?” and so on.

And that routine went on unrevised, even after Dwayne started to go

crazy, so Lottie had nothing unusual to notice.

Kilgore Trout owned a parakeet named Bill. Like Dwayne Hoover, Trout

was all alone at night, except for his pet. Trout, too, talked to his pet.

But while Dwayne babbled to his Labrador retriever about love, Trout

sneered and muttered to his parakeet about the end of the world.

“Any time now,” he would say. “And high time, too.”

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It was Trout’s theory that the atmosphere would become

unbreathable soon.

Trout supposed that when the atmosphere became poisonous, Bill

would keel over a few minutes before Trout did. He would kid Bill

about that. “How’s the old respiration, Bill?” he’d say, or, “Seems like

you’ve got a touch of the old emphysema, Bill,” or, “We never

discussed what kind of a funeral you want, Bill. You never even told

me what your religion is.” And so on.

He told Bill that humanity deserved to die horribly, since it had

behaved so cruelly and wastefully on a planet so sweet. “We’re all

Heliogabalus, Bill,” he would say. This was the name of a Roman

emperor who had a sculptor make a hollow, life-size iron bull with a

door on it. The door could be locked from the outside. The bull’s

mouth was open. That was the only other opening to the outside.

Heliogabalus would have a human being put into the bull through the

door, and the door would be locked. Any sounds the human being

made in there would come out of the mouth of the bull. Heliogabalus

would have guests in for a nice party, with plenty of food and wine and

beautiful women and pretty boys—and Heliogabalus would have a

servant light kindling. The kindling was under dry firewood—which

was under the bull.

Trout did another thing which some people might have considered

eccentric: he called mirrors leaks. It amused him to pretend that

mirrors were holes between two universes.

If he saw a child near a mirror, he might wag his finger at a child

warningly, and say with great solemnity, “Don’t get too near that leak.

You wouldn’t want to wind up in the other universe, would you?”

Sometimes somebody would say in his presence, “Excuse me, I

have to take a leak.” This was a way of saying that the speaker

intended to drain liquid wastes from his body through a valve in his

lower abdomen.

And Trout would reply waggishly, “Where I come from, that means

you’re about to steal a mirror.”

And so on.

By the time of Trout’s death, of course, everybody called mirrors

leaks. That was how respectable even his jokes had become.

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In 1972, Trout lived in a basement apartment in Cohoes, New York.

He made his living as an installer of aluminum combination storm

windows and screens. He had nothing to do with the sales end of the

business—because he had no charm. Charm was a scheme for

making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what

the charmer had in mind.

Dwayne Hoover had oodles of charm.

I can have oodles of charm when I want to.

A lot of people have oodles of charm.

Trout’s employer and co-workers had no idea that he was a writer. No

reputable publisher had ever heard of him, for that matter, even

though he had written one hundred and seventeen novels and two

thousand short stories by the time he met Dwayne.

He made carbon copies of nothing he wrote. He mailed off

manuscripts without enclosing stamped, self-addressed envelopes for

their safe return. Sometimes he didn’t even include a return address.

He got names and addresses of publishers from magazines devoted

to the writing business, which he read avidly in the periodical rooms

of public libraries. He thus got in touch with a firm called World

Classics Library, which published hard-core pornography in Los

Angeles, California. They used his stories, which usually didn’t even

have women in them, to give bulk to books and magazines of

salacious pictures.

They never told him where or when he might expect to find himself in

print. Here is what they paid him: doodley-squat.

They didn’t even send him complimentary copies of the books and

magazines in which he appeared, so he had to search them out

in pornography stores. And the titles he gave to his stories were

often changed. “Pan Galactic Straw-boss,” for instance, became

“Mouth Crazy.”

Most distracting to Trout, however, were the illustrations his publishers

selected, which had nothing to do with his tales. He wrote a novel, for

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27

instance, about an Earthling named Delmore Skag, a bachelor in a

neighborhood where everybody else had enormous families. And

Skag was a scientist, and he found a way to reproduce himself in

chicken soup. He would shave living cells from the palm of his right

hand, mix them with the soup, and expose the soup to cosmic rays.

The cells turned into babies which looked exactly like Delmore Skag.

Pretty soon, Delmore was having several babies a day, and inviting

his neighbors to share his pride and happiness. He had mass

baptisms of as many as a hundred babies at a time. He became

famous as a family man.

And so on.

Skag hoped to force his country into making laws against excessively

large families, but the legislatures and the courts declined to meet the

problem head-on. They passed stern laws instead against the

possession by unmarried persons of chicken soup.

And so on.

The illustrations for this book were murky photographs of several

white women giving blow jobs to the same black man, who, for some

reason, wore a Mexican sombrero.

At the time he met Dwayne Hoover, Trout’s most widely-distributed

book was Plague on Wheels. The publisher didn’t change the title, but

he obliterated most of it and all of Trout’s name with a lurid banner

which made this promise:

A wide-open beaver was a photograph of a woman not wearing

underpants, and with her legs far apart, so that the mouth of her

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28

vagina could be seen. The expression was first used by news

photographers, who often got to see up women’s skirts at accidents

and sporting events and from underneath fire escapes and so on.

They needed a code word to yell to other newsmen and friendly

policemen and firemen and so on, to let them know what could be

seen, in case they wanted to see it. The word was this: “Beaver!”

A beaver was actually a large rodent. It loved water, so it built dams. It

looked like this:

The sort of beaver which excited news photographers so much looked

like this:

This was where babies came from.

When Dwayne was a boy, when Kilgore Trout was a boy, when I was a

boy, and even when we became middle-aged men and older, it was

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29

the duty of the police and the courts to keep representations of such

ordinary apertures from being examined and discussed by persons not

engaged in the practice of medicine. It was somehow decided that

wide-open beavers, which were ten thousand times as common as real

beavers, should be the most massively defended secret under law.

So there was a madness about wide-open beavers. There was also a

madness about a soft, weak metal, an element, which had somehow

been declared the most desirable of all elements, which was gold.

And the madness about wide-open beavers was extended to

underpants when Dwayne and Trout and I were boys. Girls concealed

their underpants at all costs, and boys tried to see their underpants at

all costs.

Female underpants looked like this:

One of the first things Dwayne learned in school as a little boy, in fact,

was a poem he was supposed to scream in case he saw a girl’s

underpants by accident in the playground. Other students taught it to

him. This was it:

I see England,

I see France;

I see a little girl’s

Underpants!

When Kilgore Trout accepted the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1979, he

declared: “Some people say there is no such thing as progress. The

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fact that human beings are now the only animals left on Earth, I

confess, seems a confusing sort of victory. Those of you familiar with

the nature of my earlier published works will understand why I

mourned especially when the last beaver died.

“There were two monsters sharing this planet with us when I was a

boy, however, and I celebrate their extinction today. They were

determined to kill us, or at least to make our lives meaningless. They

came close to success. They were cruel adversaries, which my little

friends the beavers were not. Lions? No. Tigers? No. Lions and tigers

snoozed most of the time. The monsters I will name never snoozed.

They inhabited our heads. They were the arbitrary lusts for gold, and,

God help us, for a glimpse of a little girl’s underpants.

“I thank those lusts for being so ridiculous, for they taught us that it

was possible for a human being to believe anything, and to behave

passionately in keeping with that belief —any belief.

“So now we can build an unselfish society by devoting to

unselfishness the frenzy we once devoted to gold and to underpants.”

He paused, and then he recited with wry mournfulness the beginning

of a poem he had learned to scream in Bermuda, when he was a little

boy. The poem was all the more poignant, since it mentioned two

nations which no longer existed as such. “I see England,” he said, “I

see France—”

Actually, women’s underpants had been drastically devalued by the

time of the historic meeting between Dwayne Hoover and Trout. The

price of gold was still on the rise.

Photographs of women’s underpants weren’t worth the paper they

were printed on, and even high quality color motion pictures of wideopen beavers were going begging in the marketplace.

There had been a time when a copy of Trout’s most popular book to

date, Plague on Wheels, had brought as much as twelve dollars,

because of the illustrations. It was now being offered for a dollar, and

people who paid even that much did so not because of the pictures.

They paid for the words.

The words in the book, incidentally, were about life on a dying planet

named Lingo-Three, whose inhabitants resembled American

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automobiles. They had wheels. They were powered by internal

combustion engines. They ate fossil fuels. They weren’t

manufactured, though. They reproduced. They laid eggs containing

baby automobiles, and the babies matured in pools of oil drained from

adult crankcases.

Lingo-Three was visited by space travelers, who learned that the

creatures were becoming extinct for this reason: they had destroyed

their planet’s resources, including its atmosphere.

The space travelers weren’t able to offer much in the way of material

assistance. The automobile creatures hoped to borrow some oxygen,

and to have the visitors carry at least one of their eggs to another planet,

where it might hatch, where an automobile civilization could begin again.

But the smallest egg they had was a forty-eight pounder, and the space

travelers themselves were only an inch high, and their space ship wasn’t

even as big as an Earthling shoebox. They were from Zeltoldimar.

The spokesman for the Zeltoldimarians was Kago. Kago said that all he

could do was to tell others in the Universe about how wonderful the

automobile creatures had been. Here is what he said to all those rusting

junkers who were out of gas: “You will be gone, but not forgotten.”

The illustration for the story at this point showed two Chinese girls,

seemingly identical twins, seated on a couch with their legs wide open.

So Kago and his brave little Zeltoldimarian crew, which was all

homosexual, roamed the Universe, keeping the memory of the

automobile creatures alive. They came at last to the planet Earth. In

all innocence, Kago told the Earthlings about the automobiles. Kago

did not know that human beings could be as easily felled by a single

idea as by cholera or the bubonic plague. There was no immunity to

cuckoo ideas on Earth.

And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not

reject ideas because they were bad: “Ideas on Earth were badges of

friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with

friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with

enemies, in order to express enmity.

“The ideas Earthlings held didn’t matter for hundreds of thousands of

years, since they couldn’t do much about them anyway. Ideas might

as well be badges as anything.

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“They even had a saying about the futility of ideas: ‘If wishes were

horses, beggars would ride.’

“And then Earthlings discovered tools. Suddenly agreeing with

friends could be a form of suicide or worse. But agreements went on,

not for the sake of common sense or decency or self-preservation,

but for friendliness.

“Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been

thinking instead. And even when they built computers to do some

thinking for them, they designed them not so much for wisdom as for

friendliness. So they were doomed. Homicidal beggars could ride.”

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Chapter 3

Within a century of little Kago’s arrival on Earth, according to Trout’s

novel, every form of life on that once peaceful and moist and

nourishing blue-green ball was dying or dead. Everywhere were the

shells of the great beetles which men had made and worshipped.

They were automobiles. They had killed everything.

Little Kago himself died long before the planet did. He was attempting to

lecture on the evils of the automobile in a bar in Detroit. But he was so

tiny that nobody paid any attention to him. He lay down to rest for a

moment, and a drunk automobile worker mistook him for a kitchen

match. He killed Kago by trying to strike him repeatedly on the underside

of the bar.

Trout received only one fan letter before 1972. It was from an

eccentric millionaire, who hired a private detective agency to discover

who and where he was. Trout was so invisible that the search cost

eighteen thousand dollars.

The fan letter reached him in his basement in Cohoes. It was handwritten, and Trout concluded that the writer might be fourteen years

old or so. The letter said that Plague on Wheels was the greatest

novel in the English language, and that Trout should be President of

the United States.

Trout read the letter out loud to his parakeet. “Things are looking up,

Bill,” he said. “Always knew they would. Get a load of this.” And then he

read the letter. There was no indication in the letter that the writer, whose

name was Eliot Rosewater, was a grownup, was fabulously well-to-do.

Kilgore Trout, incidentally, could never be President of the United

States without a Constitutional amendment. He hadn’t been born

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inside the country. His birthplace was Bermuda. His father, Leo Trout,

while remaining an American citizen, worked there for many years for

the Royal Ornithological Society—guarding the only nesting place in

the world for Bermuda Erns. These great green sea eagles eventually

became extinct, despite anything anyone could do.

As a child, Trout had seen those Erns die, one by one. His father had

assigned him the melancholy task of measuring wingspreads of the

corpses. These were the largest creatures ever to fly under their own

power on the planet. And the last corpse had the greatest wingspread

of all, which was nineteen feet, two and three-quarters inches.

After all the Erns were dead, it was discovered what had killed them. It

was a fungus, which attacked their eyes and brains. Men had brought

the fungus to their rookery in the innocent form of athlete’s foot.

Here is what the flag of Kilgore Trout’s native island looked like:

So Kilgore Trout had a depressing childhood, despite all of the

sunshine and fresh air. The pessimism that overwhelmed him in later

life, which destroyed his three marriages, which drove his only son,

Leo, from home at the age of fourteen, very likely had its roots in the

bittersweet mulch of rotting Erns.

The fan letter came much too late. It wasn’t good news. It was

perceived as an invasion of privacy by Kilgore Trout. The letter from

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Rosewater promised that he would make Trout famous. This is what

Trout had to say about that, with only his parakeet listening: “Keep the

hell out of my body bag.”

A body bag was a large plastic envelope for a freshly killed American

soldier. It was a new invention.

I do not know who invented the body bag. I do know who invented

Kilgore Trout. I did.

I made him snaggle-toothed. I gave him hair, but I turned it white. I

wouldn’t let him comb it or go to a barber. I made him grow it long

and tangled.

I gave him the same legs the Creator of the Universe gave to my

father when my father was a pitiful old man. They were pale white

broomsticks. They were hairless. They were embossed fantastically

with varicose veins.

And, two months after Trout received his first fan letter, I had him find

in his mailbox an invitation to be a speaker at an arts festival in the

American Middle West.

The letter was from the Festival’s chairman, Fred T. Barry. He was

respectful, almost reverent about Kilgore Trout. He beseeched him to

be one of several distinguished out-of-town participants in the Festival,

which would last for five days. It would celebrate the opening of the

Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts in Midland City.

The letter did not say so, but Mildred Barry was the late mother of the

Chairman, the wealthiest man in Midland City. Fred T. Barry had paid

for the new Center of the Arts, which was a translucent sphere on

stilts. It had no windows. When illuminated inside at night, it

resembled a rising harvest moon.

Fred T. Barry, incidentally, was exactly the same age as Trout. They

had the same birthday. But they certainly didn’t look anything alike.

Fred T. Barry didn’t even look like a white man anymore, even though

he was of pure English stock. As he grew older and older and happier

and happier, and all his hair fell out everywhere, he came to look like

an ecstatic old Chinaman.

He looked so much like a Chinaman that he had taken to dressing like

a Chinaman. Real Chinamen often mistook him for a real Chinaman.

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Fred T. Barry confessed in his letter that he had not read the works of

Kilgore Trout, but that he would joyfully do so before the Festival

began. “You come highly recommended by Eliot Rosewater,” he said,

“who assures me that you are perhaps the greatest living American

novelist. There can be no higher praise than that.”

Clipped to the letter was a check for one thousand dollars. Fred T.

Barry explained that this was for travel expenses and an honorarium.

It was a lot of money. Trout was suddenly fabulously well-to-do.

Here is how Trout happened to be invited: Fred T. Barry wanted to

have a fabulously valuable oil painting as a focal point for the Midland

City Festival of the Arts. As rich as he was, he couldn’t afford to buy

one, so he looked for one to borrow.

The first person he went to was Eliot Rosewater, who owned an El

Greco worth three million dollars or more. Rosewater said the Festival

could have the picture on one condition: that it hire as a speaker the

greatest living writer in the English language, who was Kilgore Trout.

Trout laughed at the flattering invitation, but he felt fear after that.

Once again, a stranger was tampering with the privacy of his body

bag. He put this question to his parakeet haggardly, and he rolled his

eyes: “Why all this sudden interest in Kilgore Trout?”

He read the letter again. “They not only want Kilgore Trout,” he said,

“they want him in a tuxedo, Bill. Some mistake has been made.”

He shrugged. “Maybe they invited me because they know I have a

tuxedo,” he said. He really did own a tuxedo. It was in a steamer

trunk which he had lugged from place to place for more than forty

years. It contained toys from childhood, the bones of a Bermuda Ern,

and many other curiosities including the tuxedo he had worn to a

senior dance just prior to his graduation from Thomas Jefferson High

School in Dayton, Ohio, in 1924. Trout was born in Bermuda, and

attended grammar school there. But then his family moved to Dayton.

His high school was named after a slave owner who was also one of

the world’s greatest theoreticians on the subject of human liberty.

Trout got his tuxedo out of the trunk and he put it on. It was a lot like a

tuxedo I’d seen my father put on when he was an old, old man. It had a

greenish patina of mold. Some of the growths it supported resembled

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patches of fine rabbit fur. “This will do nicely for the evenings,” said

Trout. “But tell me, Bill—what does one wear in Midland City in October

before the sun goes down?” He hauled up his pants legs so that his

grotesquely ornamental shins were exposed. “Bermuda shorts and

bobby socks, eh, Bill? After all—I am from Bermuda.”

He dabbed at his tuxedo with a damp rag, and the fungi came away

easily. “Hate to do this, Bill,” he said of the fungi he was murdering.

“Fungi have as much right to life as I do. They know what they want,

Bill. Damned if I do anymore.”

Then he thought about what Bill himself might want. It was easy to

guess. “Bill,” he said, “I like you so much, and I am such a big shot in

the Universe, that I will make your three biggest wishes come true.”

He opened the door of the cage, something Bill couldn’t have done in

a thousand years.

Bill flew over to a windowsill. He put his little shoulder against the

glass. There was just one layer of glass between Bill and the great

out-of-doors. Although Trout was in the storm window business, he

had no storm windows on his own abode.

“Your second wish is about to come true,” said Trout, and he again did

something which Bill could never have done. He opened the window.

But the opening of the window was such an alarming business to the

parakeet that he flew back to his cage and hopped inside.

Trout closed the door of the cage and latched it. “That’s the most

intelligent use of three wishes I ever heard of,” he told the bird. “You

made sure you’d still have something worth wishing for—to get out of

the cage.”

Trout made the connection between his lone fan letter and the invitation,

but he couldn’t believe that Eliot Rosewater was a grownup. Rosewater’s

handwriting looked like this:

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“Bill,” said Trout tentatively, “some teen-ager named Rosewater got

me this job. His parents must be friends of the Chairman of the Arts

Festival, and they don’t know anything about books out that way. So

when he said I was good, they believed him.”

Trout shook his head. “I’m not going, Bill. I don’t want out of my cage.

I’m too smart for that. Even if I did want out, though, I wouldn’t go to

Midland City to make a laughing stock of myself—and my only fan.”

He left it at that. But he reread the invitation from time to time, got to

know it by heart. And then one of the subtler messages on the paper

got through to him. It was in the letterhead, which displayed two

masks intended to represent comedy and tragedy:

One mask looked like this:

The other one looked like this:

“They don’t want anything but smilers out there,” Trout said to his

parakeet. “Unhappy failures need not apply.” But his mind wouldn’t

leave it alone at that. He got an idea which he found very tangy: “But

maybe an unhappy failure is exactly what they need to see.”

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He became energetic after that. “Bill, Bill—” he said, “listen, I’m

leaving the cage, but I’m coming back. I’m going out there to show

them what nobody has ever seen at an arts festival before: a

representative of all the thousands of artists who devoted their entire

lives to a search for truth and beauty—and didn’t find doodley-squat!”

Trout accepted the invitation after all. Two days before the Festival

was to begin, he delivered Bill into the care of his landlady upstairs,

and he hitchhiked to New York City—with five hundred dollars

pinned to the inside of his underpants. The rest of the money he had

put in a bank.

He went to New York first—because he hoped to find some of his

books in pornography stores there. He had no copies at home. He

despised them, but now he wanted to read out loud from them in

Midland City—as a demonstration of a tragedy which was ludicrous

as well.

He planned to tell the people out there what he hoped to have in the

way of a tombstone.

This was it:

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Chapter 4

Dwayne was meanwhile getting crazier all the time. He saw eleven

moons in the sky over the new Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the

Arts one night. The next morning, he saw a huge duck directing traffic

at the intersection of Arsenal Avenue and Old County Road. He didn’t

tell anybody what he saw. He maintained secrecy.

And the bad chemicals in his head were fed up with secrecy. They

were no longer content with making him feel and see queer things.

They wanted him to do queer things, also, and make a lot of noise.

They wanted Dwayne Hoover to be proud of his disease.

People said later that they were furious with themselves for not

noticing the danger signals in Dwayne’s behavior, for ignoring his

obvious cries for help. After Dwayne ran amok, the local paper ran a

deeply sympathetic editorial about it, begging people to watch each

other for danger signals. Here was its title:

A CRY FOR HELP

But Dwayne wasn’t all that weird before he met Kilgore Trout. His

behavior in public kept him well within the limits of acceptable acts and

beliefs and conversations in Midland City. The person closest to him,

Francine Pefko, his white secretary and mistress, said that Dwayne

seemed to be getting happier and happier all the time during the

month before Dwayne went public as a maniac.

“I kept thinking,” she told a newspaper reporter from her hospital bed,

“‘He is finally getting over his wife’s suicide.’”

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Francine worked at Dwayne’s principal place of business, which was

Dwayne Hoover’s Exit Eleven Pontiac Village, just off the Interstate,

next door to the new Holiday Inn.

Here is what made Francine think he was becoming happier:

Dwayne began to sing songs which had been popular in his youth,

such as “The Old Lamp Lighter,” and “Tippy-Tippy-Tin,” and “Hold

Tight,” and “Blue Moon,” and so on. Dwayne had never sung before.

Now he did it loudly as he sat at his desk, when he took a customer

for a ride in a demonstrator, when he watched a mechanic service a

car. One day he sang loudly as he crossed the lobby of the new

Holiday Inn, smiling and gesturing at people as though he had been

hired to sing for their pleasure. But nobody thought that was

necessarily a hint of derangement, either—especially since Dwayne

owned a piece of the Inn.

A black bus boy and a black waiter discussed this singing. “Listen at

him sing,” said the bus boy.

“If I owned what he owns, I’d sing, too,” the waiter replied.

The only person who said out loud that Dwayne was going crazy was

Dwayne’s white sales manager at the Pontiac agency, who was Harry

LeSabre. A full week before Dwayne went off his rocker, Harry said to

Francine Pefko, “Something has come over Dwayne. He used to be

so charming. I don’t find him so charming anymore.”

Harry knew Dwayne better than did any other man. He had been with

Dwayne for twenty years. He came to work for him when the agency

was right on the edge of the Nigger part of town. A Nigger was a

human being who was black.

“I know him the way a combat soldier knows his buddy,” said Harry.

“We used to put our lives on the line every day, when the agency was

down on Jefferson Street. We got held up on the average of fourteen

times a year. And I tell you that the Dwayne of today is a Dwayne I

never saw before.”

It was true about the holdups. That was how Dwayne bought a

Pontiac agency so cheaply. White people were the only people with

money enough to buy new automobiles, except for a few black

criminals, who always wanted Cadillacs. And white people were

scared to go anywhere on Jefferson Street anymore.

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Here is where Dwayne got the money to buy the agency: He borrowed

it from the Midland County National Bank. For collateral, he put up

stock he owned in a company which was then called The Midland City

Ordnance Company. It later became Barrytron, Limited. When

Dwayne first got the stock, in the depths of the Great Depression, the

company was called The Robo-Magic Corporation of America.

The name of the company kept changing through the years because the

nature of its business changed so much. But its management hung on to

the company’s original motto—for old time’s sake. The motto was this:

GOODBYE, BLUE MONDAY.

Listen:

Harry LeSabre said to Francine, “When a man has been in combat with

another man, he gets so he can sense the slightest change in his

buddy’s personality, and Dwayne has changed. You ask Vernon Garr.”

Vernon Garr was a white mechanic who was the only other employee

who had been with Dwayne before Dwayne moved the agency out to

the Interstate. As it happened, Vernon was having trouble at home.

His wife, Mary, was a schizophrenic, so Vernon hadn’t noticed

whether Dwayne had changed or not. Vernon’s wife believed that

Vernon was trying to turn her brains into plutonium.

Harry LeSabre was entitled to talk about combat. He had been in

actual combat in a war. Dwayne hadn’t been in combat. He was a

civilian employee of the United States Army Air Corps during the

Second World War, though. One time he got to paint a message on a

five-hundred-pound bomb which was going to be dropped on

Hamburg, Germany. This was it:

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“Harry,” said Francine, “everybody is entitled to a few bad days.

Dwayne has fewer than anybody I know, so when he does have one

like today, some people are hurt and surprised. They shouldn’t be.

He’s human like anybody else.”

“But why should he single out me?” Harry wanted to know. He

was right: Dwayne had singled him out for astonishing insults

and abuse that day. Everybody else still found Dwayne nothing

but charming.

Later on, of course, Dwayne would assault all sorts of people, even

three strangers from Erie, Pennsylvania, who had never been to

Midland City before. But Harry was an isolated victim now.

“Why me?” said Harry. This was a common question in Midland

City. People were always asking that as they were loaded into

ambulances after accidents of various kinds, or arrested for

disorderly conduct, or burglarized, or socked in the nose and so on:

“Why me?”

“Probably because he felt that you were man enough and friend

enough to put up with him on one of his few bad days,” said Francine.

“How would you like it if he insulted your clothes?” said Harry. This is

what Dwayne had done to him: insulted his clothes.

“I would remember that he was the best employer in town,” said

Francine. This was true. Dwayne paid high wages. He had profitsharing and Christmas bonuses at the end of every year. He was the

first automobile dealer in his part of the State to offer his employees

Blue Cross-Blue Shield, which was health insurance. He had a

retirement plan which was superior to every retirement plan in the city

with the exception of the one at Barrytron. His office door was always

open to any employee who had troubles to discuss, whether they had

to do with the automobile business or not.

For instance, on the day he insulted Harry’s clothing, he also spent

two hours with Vernon Garr, discussing the hallucinations Vernon’s

wife was having. “She sees things that aren’t there,” said Vernon.

“She needs rest, Vern,” said Dwayne.

“Maybe I’m going crazy, too,” said Vernon. “Christ, I go home and I

talk for hours to my fucking dog.”

“That makes two of us,” said Dwayne.

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Here is the scene between Harry and Dwayne which upset Harry

so much:

Harry went into Dwayne’s office right after Vernon left. He expected no

trouble, because he had never had any serious trouble with Dwayne.

“How’s my old combat buddy today?” he said to Dwayne.

“As good as can be expected,” said Dwayne. “Anything special

bothering you?”

“No,” said Harry.

“Vern’s wife thinks Vern is trying to turn her brains into plutonium,”

said Dwayne.

“What’s plutonium?” said Harry, and so on. They rambled along, and

Harry made up a problem for himself just to keep the conversation

lively. He said he was sad sometimes that he had no children. “But

I’m glad in a way, too,” he went on. “I mean, why should I contribute

to overpopulation?”

Dwayne didn’t say anything.

“Maybe we should have adopted one,” said Harry, “but it’s too late

now. And the old lady and me—we have a good time just horsing

around with ourselves. What do we need a kid for?”

It was after the mention of adoption that Dwayne blew up. He himself

had been adopted—by a couple who had moved to Midland City from

West Virginia in order to make big money as factory workers in the

First World War. Dwayne’s real mother was a spinster school teacher

who wrote sentimental poetry and claimed to be descended from

Richard the Lion-Hearted, who was a king. His real father was an

itinerant typesetter, who seduced his mother by setting her poems in

type. He didn’t sneak them into a newspaper or anything. It was

enough for her that they were set in type.

She was a defective child-bearing machine. She destroyed herself

automatically while giving birth to Dwayne. The printer disappeared.

He was a disappearing machine.

It may be that the subject of adoption caused an unfortunate chemical

reaction in Dwayne’s head. At any rate, Dwayne suddenly snarled this

at Harry: “Harry, why don’t you get a bunch of cotton waste from Vern

Garr, soak it in Blue Sunoco, and burn up your fucking wardrobe? You

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make me feel like I’m at Watson Brothers.” Watson Brothers was the

name of the funeral parlor for white people who were at least

moderately well-to-do. Blue Sunoco was a brand of gasoline.

Harry was startled, and then pain set in. Dwayne had never said

anything about his clothes in all the years he’d known him. The

clothes were conservative and neat, in Harry’s opinion. His shirts were

white. His ties were black or navy blue. His suits were gray or dark

blue. His shoes and socks were black.

“Listen, Harry,” said Dwayne, and his expression was mean,

“Hawaiian Week is coming up, and I’m absolutely serious: burn your

clothes and get new ones, or apply for work at Watson Brothers. Have

yourself embalmed while you’re at it.”

Harry couldn’t do anything but let his mouth hang open. The Hawaiian

Week Dwayne had mentioned was a sales promotion scheme which

involved making the agency look as much like the Hawaiian Islands as

possible. People who bought new or used cars, or had repairs done in

excess of five hundred dollars during the week would be entered

automatically in a lottery. Three lucky people would each win a free,

all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas and San Francisco and then

Hawaii for a party of two.

“I don’t mind that you have the name of a Buick, Harry, when you’re

supposed to be selling Pontiacs—” Dwayne went on. He was

referring to the fact that the Buick division of General Motors put out a

model called the Le Sabre. “You can’t help that.” Dwayne now patted

the top of his desk softly. This was somehow more menacing than if

he had pounded the desk with his fist. “But there are a hell of a lot of

things you can change, Harry. There’s a long weekend coming up. I

expect to see some big changes in you when I come to work on

Tuesday morning.”

The weekend was extra-long because the coming Monday was a

national holiday, Veterans’ Day. It was in honor of people who had

served their country in uniform.

“When we started selling Pontiacs, Harry,” said Dwayne, “the car was

sensible transportation for school teachers and grandmothers and

maiden aunts.” This was true. “Perhaps you haven’t noticed, Harry,

but the Pontiac has now become a glamorous, youthful adventure for

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people who want a kick out of life! And you dress and act like this was

a mortuary! Look at yourself in a mirror, Harry, and ask yourself, ‘Who

could ever associate a man like this with a Pontiac?’”

Harry LeSabre was too choked up to point out to Dwayne that, no

matter what he looked like, he was generally acknowledged to be one

of the most effective sales managers for Pontiac not only in the State,

but in the entire Middle West. Pontiac was the best-selling automobile

in the Midland City area, despite the fact that it was not a low-price

car. It was a medium-price car.

Dwayne Hoover told poor Harry LeSabre that the Hawaiian Festival,

only a long weekend away, was Harry’s golden opportunity to

loosen up, to have some fun, to encourage other people to have

some fun, too.

“Harry,” said Dwayne. “I have some news for you: modern science

has given us a whole lot of wonderful new colors, with strange,

exciting names like red!, orange!, green!, and pink!, Harry. We’re not

stuck any more with just black, gray and white! Isn’t that good news,

Harry? And the State Legislature has just announced that it is no

longer a crime to smile during working hours, Harry, and I have the

personal promise of the Governor that never again will anybody be

sent to the Sexual Offenders’ Wing of the Adult Correctional

Institution for telling a joke!”

Harry LeSabre might have weathered all this with only minor damage,

if only Harry hadn’t been a secret transvestite. On weekends he liked

to dress up in women’s clothing, and not drab clothing, either. Harry

and his wife would pull down the window blinds, and Harry would turn

into a bird of paradise.

Nobody but Harry’s wife knew his secret.

When Dwayne razzed him about the clothes he wore to work, and

then mentioned the Sexual Offenders’ Wing of the Adult Correctional

Institution at Shepherdstown, Harry had to suspect that his secret

was out. And it wasn’t merely a comical secret, either. Harry could be

arrested for what he did on weekends. He could be fined up to three

thousand dollars and sentenced to as much as five years at hard

labor in the Sexual Offenders’ Wing of the Adult Correctional

Institution at Shepherdstown.

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47

So poor Harry spent a wretched Veterans’ Day weekend after that.

But Dwayne spent a worse one.

Here is what the last night of that weekend was like for Dwayne: his

bad chemicals rolled him out of bed. They made him dress as

though there were some sort of emergency with which he had to

deal. This was in the wee hours. Veterans’ Day had ended at the

stroke of twelve.

Dwayne’s bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber

revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a

tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings. It

looked like this:

In Dwayne’s part of the planet, anybody who wanted one could get

one down at his local hardware store. Policemen all had them. So did

the criminals. So did the people caught in between.

Criminals would point guns at people and say, “Give me all your

money,” and the people usually would. And policemen would point

their guns at criminals and say, “Stop” or whatever the situation called

for, and the criminals usually would. Sometimes they wouldn’t.

Sometimes a wife would get so mad at her husband that she would

put a hole in him with a gun. Sometimes a husband would get so mad

at his wife that he would put a hole in her. And so on.

In the same week Dwayne Hoover ran amok, a fourteen-year-old

Midland City boy put holes in his mother and father because he didn’t

want to show them the bad report card he had brought home. His

lawyer planned to enter a plea of temporary insanity, which meant that

at the time of the shooting the boy was unable to distinguish the

difference between right and wrong.

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48

Sometimes people would put holes in famous people so they could be

at least fairly famous, too. Sometimes people would get on airplanes

which were supposed to fly to someplace, and they would offer to put

holes in the pilot and co-pilot unless they flew the airplane to

someplace else.

Dwayne held the muzzle of his gun in his mouth for a while. He tasted

oil. The gun was loaded and cocked. There were neat little metal

packages containing charcoal, potassium nitrate and sulphur only

inches from his brains. He had only to trip a lever, and the powder

would turn to gas. The gas would blow a chunk of lead down a tube

and through Dwayne’s brains.

But Dwayne elected to shoot up one of his tiled bathrooms instead. He

put chunks of lead through his toilet and a washbasin and a bathtub

enclosure. There was a picture of a flamingo sandblasted on the glass

of the bathtub enclosure. It looked like this:

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Dwayne shot the flamingo.

He snarled at his recollection of it afterwards. Here is what he snarled:

“Dumb fucking bird.”

Nobody heard the shots. All the houses in the neighborhood were too

well insulated for sound ever to get in or out. A sound wanting in or out

of Dwayne’s dreamhouse, for instance, had to go through an inch and

a half of plasterboard, a polystyrene vapor barrier, a sheet of

aluminum foil, a three-inch airspace, another sheet of aluminum foil, a

three-inch blanket of glass wool, another sheet of aluminum foil, one

inch of insulating board made of pressed sawdust, tarpaper, one inch

of wood sheathing, more tarpaper, and then aluminum siding which

was hollow. The space in the siding was filled with a miracle insulating

material developed for use on rockets to the Moon.

Dwayne turned on the floodlights around his house, and he played

basketball on the blacktop apron outside his five-car garage.

Dwayne’s dog Sparky hid in the basement when Dwayne shot up

the bathroom. But he came out now. Sparky watched Dwayne

play basketball.

“You and me, Sparky,” said Dwayne. And so on. He sure loved that dog.

Nobody saw him playing basketball. He was screened from his

neighbors by trees and shrubs and a high cedar fence.

He put the basketball away, and he climbed into a black Plymouth

Fury he had taken in trade the day before. The Plymouth was a

Chrysler product, and Dwayne himself sold General Motors products.

He had decided to drive the Plymouth for a day or two in order to keep

abreast of the competition.

As he backed out of his driveway, he thought it important to explain to

his neighbors why he was in a Plymouth Fury, so he yelled out the

window: “Keeping abreast of the competition!” He blew his horn.

Dwayne zoomed down Old County Road and onto the Interstate,

which he had all to himself. He swerved into Exit Ten at a high rate of

speed, slammed into a guardrail, spun around and around. He came

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50

out onto Union Avenue going backwards, jumped a curb, and came to

a stop in a vacant lot. Dwayne owned the lot.

Nobody saw or heard anything. Nobody lived in the area. A policeman

was supposed to cruise by about once every hour or so, but he was

cooping in an alley behind a Western Electric warehouse about two

miles away. Cooping was police slang for sleeping on the job.

Dwayne stayed in his vacant lot for a while. He played the radio. All

the Midland City stations were asleep for the night, but Dwayne

picked up a country music station in West Virginia, which offered him

ten different kinds of flowering shrubs and five fruit trees for six

dollars, C.O.D.

“Sounds good to me,” said Dwayne. He meant it. Almost all the

messages which were sent and received in his country, even the

telepathic ones, had to do with buying or selling some damn thing.

They were like lullabies to Dwayne.

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Chapter 5

While Dwayne Hoover listened to West Virginia, Kilgore Trout tried

to fall asleep in a movie theater in New York City. It was much

cheaper than a night in a hotel. Trout had never done it before, but

he knew sleeping in movie houses was the sort of thing really dirty

old men did. He wished to arrive in Midland City as the dirtiest of

all old men. He was supposed to take part in a symposium out

there entitled “The Future of the American Novel in the Age of

McLuhan.” He wished to say at that symposium, “I don’t know who

McLuhan is, but I know what it’s like to spend the night with a lot of

other dirty old men in a movie theater in New York City. Could we

talk about that?”

He wished to say, too, “Does this McLuhan, whoever he is, have

anything to say about the relationship between wide-open beavers

and the sales of books?”

Trout had come down from Cohoes late that afternoon. He had since

visited many pornography shops and a shirt store. He had bought two

of his own books, Plague on Wheels and Now It Can Be Told, a

magazine containing a short story of his, and a tuxedo shirt. The name

of the magazine was Black Garterbelt. The tuxedo shirt had a cascade

of ruffles down its bosom. On the shirt salesman’s advice, Trout had

also bought a packaged ensemble consisting of a cumberbund, a

boutonnière, and a bow tie. They were all the color of tangerines.

These goodies were all in his lap, along with a crackling brown paper

parcel containing his tuxedo, six new pairs of jockey shorts, six new

pairs of socks, his razor and a new toothbrush. Trout hadn’t owned a

toothbrush for years.

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The jackets of Plague on Wheels and Now It Can Be Told both

promised plenty of wide-open beavers inside. The picture on the cover

of Now It Can Be Told, which was the book which would turn Dwayne

Hoover into a homicidal maniac, showed a college professor being

undressed by a group of naked sorority girls. A library tower could be

seen through a window in the sorority house. It was daytime outside,

and there was a clock in the tower. The clock looked like this:

The professor was stripped down to his candy-striped underwear

shorts and his socks and garters and his mortar-board, which was a

hat which looked like this:

There was absolutely nothing about a professor or a sorority or a

university anywhere in the body of the book. The book was in the form

of a long letter from the Creator of the Universe to the only creature in

the Universe who had free will.

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As for the story in Black Garterbelt magazine: Trout had no idea that it

had been accepted for publication. It had been accepted years ago,

apparently, for the date on the magazine was April, 1962. Trout found

it by chance in a bin of tame old magazines near the front of the store.

They were underpants magazines.

When he bought the magazine, the cashier supposed Trout was drunk

or feeble-minded. All he was getting, the cashier thought, was pictures

of women in their underpants. Their legs were apart, all right, but they

had on underpants, so they were certainly no competition for the wideopen beavers on sale in the back of the store.

“I hope you enjoy it,” said the cashier to Trout. He meant that he

hoped Trout would find some pictures he could masturbate to, since

that was the only point of all the books and magazines.

“It’s for an arts festival,” said Trout.

As for the story itself, it was entitled “The Dancing Fool.” Like so many

Trout stories, it was about a tragic failure to communicate.

Here was the plot: A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on

Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could

be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the

natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing.

Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down

than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap

dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in.

The head of the house brained Zog with a golfclub.

The movie theater where Trout sat with all his parcels in his lap

showed nothing but dirty movies. The music was soothing. Phantasms

of a young man and a young woman sucked harmlessly on one

another’s soft apertures on the silver screen.

And Trout made up a new novel while he sat there. It was about an

Earthling astronaut who arrived on a planet where all the animal and

plant life had been killed by pollution, except for humanoids. The

humanoids ate food made from petroleum and coal.

They gave a feast for the astronaut, whose name was Don. The food

was terrible. The big topic of conversation was censorship. The cities

were blighted with motion picture theaters which showed nothing but

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dirty movies. The humanoids wished they could put them out of

business somehow, but without interfering with free speech.

They asked Don if dirty movies were a problem on Earth, too, and Don

said, “Yes.” They asked him if the movies were really dirty, and Don

replied, “As dirty as movies could get.”

This was a challenge to the humanoids, who were sure their dirty

movies could beat anything on Earth. So everybody piled into aircushion vehicles, and they floated to a dirty movie house downtown.

It was intermission time when they got there, so Don had some time to

think about what could possibly be dirtier than what he had already

seen on Earth. He became sexually excited even before the house

lights went down. The women in his party were all twittery and squirmy.

So the theater went dark and the curtains opened. At first there wasn’t

any picture. There were slurps and moans from loudspeakers. Then

the picture itself appeared. It was a high quality film of a male

humanoid eating what looked like a pear. The camera zoomed in on

his lips and tongue and teeth, which glistened with saliva. He took his

time about eating the pear. When the last of it had disappeared into his

slurpy mouth, the camera focussed on his Adam’s apple. His Adam’s

apple bobbed obscenely. He belched contentedly, and then these

words appeared on the screen, but in the language of the planet:

THE END

It was all faked, of course. There weren’t any pears anymore. And the

eating of a pear wasn’t the main event of the evening anyway. It was

a short subject, which gave the members of the audience time to

settle down.

Then the main feature began. It was about a male and a female and

their two children, and their dog and their cat. They ate steadily for an

hour and a half—soup, meat, biscuits, butter, vegetables, mashed

potatoes and gravy, fruit, candy, cake, pie. The camera rarely strayed

more than a foot from their glistening lips and their bobbing Adam’s

apples. And then the father put the cat and dog on the table, so they

could take part in the orgy, too.

After a while, the actors couldn’t eat any more. They were so stuffed

that they were goggle-eyed. They could hardly move. They said they

didn’t think they could eat again for a week, and so on. They cleared

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the table slowly. They went waddling out into the kitchen, and they

dumped about thirty pounds of leftovers into a garbage can.

The audience went wild.

When Don and his friends left the theater, they were accosted by

humanoid whores, who offered them eggs and oranges and milk and

butter and peanuts and so on. The whores couldn’t actually deliver

these goodies, of course.

The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would

cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices.

And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and

full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.

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Chapter 6

Dwayne Hoover sat in the used Plymouth Fury in his own vacant lot

for an hour, listening to West Virginia. He was told about health

insurance for pennies a day, about how to get better performance

from his car. He was told what to do about constipation. He was

offered a Bible which had everything that God or Jesus had actually

said out loud printed in red capital letters. He was offered a plant

which would attract and eat disease-carrying insects in his home.

All this was stored away in Dwayne’s memory, in case he should need

it later on. He had all kinds of stuff in there.

While Dwayne sat there so alone, the oldest inhabitant of Midland City

was dying in the County Hospital, at the foot of Fairchild Boulevard,

which was nine miles away. She was Mary Young. She was one

hundred and eight years old. She was black. Mary Young’s parents

had been human slaves in Kentucky.

There was a tiny connection between Mary Young and Dwayne

Hoover. She did the laundry for Dwayne’s family for a few months,

back when Dwayne was a little boy. She told Bible stories and stories

about slavery to little Dwayne. She told him about a public hanging of

a white man she had seen in Cincinnati, when she was a little girl.

A black intern at the County Hospital now watched Mary Young die

of pneumonia.

The intern did not know her. He had been in Midland City for only a

week. He wasn’t even a fellow-American, although he had taken his

medical degree at Harvard. He was an Indaro. He was a Nigerian. His

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name was Cyprian Ukwende. He felt no kinship with Mary or with any

American blacks. He felt kinship only with Indaros.

As she died, Mary was as alone on the planet as were Dwayne Hoover

or Kilgore Trout. She had never reproduced. There were no friends or

relatives to watch her die. So she spoke her very last words on the

planet to Cyprian Ukwende. She did not have enough breath left to

make her vocal cords buzz. She could only move her lips noiselessly.

Here is all she had to say about death: “Oh my, oh my.”

Like all Earthlings at the point of death, Mary Young sent faint

reminders of herself to those who had known her. She released a

small cloud of telepathic butterflies, and one of these brushed the

cheek of Dwayne Hoover, nine miles away.

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

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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 Dráno—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.

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Chapter 7

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:

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To be

the eyes

and ears

and conscience

of the Creator of the Universe,

you fool.

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:

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61

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?”

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Chapter 8

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

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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.

These were country girls. They had grown up in the rural south of the

nation, where their ancestors had been used as agricultural

machinery. The white farmers down there weren’t using machines

made out of meat anymore, though, because machines made out of

metal were cheaper and more reliable, and required simpler homes.

So the black machines had to get out of there, or starve to death.

They came to cities because everyplace else had signs like this on the

fences and trees:

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Kilgore Trout once wrote a story called “This Means You.” It was set in

the Hawaiian Islands, the place where the lucky winners of Dwayne

Hoover’s contest in Midland City were supposed to go. Every bit of

land on the islands was owned by only about forty people, and, in the

story, Trout had those people decide to exercise their property rights

to the full. They put up no trespassing signs on everything.

This created terrible problems for the million other people on the islands.

The law of gravity required that they stick somewhere on the surface.

Either that, or they could go out into the water and bob offshore.

But then the Federal Government came through with an emergency

program. It gave a big balloon full of helium to every man, woman and

child who didn’t own property.

There was a cable with a harness on it dangling from each balloon.

With the help of the balloons, Hawaiians could go on inhabiting the

islands without always sticking to things other people owned.

The prostitutes worked for a pimp now. He was splendid and cruel.

He was a god to them. He took their free will away from them, which

was perfectly all right. They didn’t want it anyway. It was as though

they had surrendered themselves to Jesus, for instance, so they

could live unselfishly and trustingly—except that they had

surrendered to a pimp instead.

Their childhoods were over. They were dying now. Earth was a tinhorn

planet as far as they were concerned.

When Trout and the theater manager, two tinhorns, said they didn’t

want any tinhorn fun, the dying children sauntered off, their feet

sticking to the planet, coming unstuck, then sticking again. They

disappeared around a corner. Trout, the eyes and ears of the Creator

of the Universe, sneezed.

“God bless you,” said the manager. This was a fully automatic

response many Americans had to hearing a person sneeze.

“Thank you,” said Trout. Thus a temporary friendship was formed.

Trout said he hoped to get safely to a cheap hotel. The manager said

he hoped, to get to the subway station on Times Square. So they

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walked together, encouraged by the echoes of their footsteps from the

building facades.

The manager told Trout a little about what the planet looked like to

him. It was a place where he had a wife and two kids, he said. They

didn’t know he ran a theater which showed blue movies. They thought

he was doing consulting work as an engineer so late at night. He said

that the planet didn’t have much use for engineers his age anymore. It

had adored them once.

“Hard times,” said Trout.

The manager told of being in on the development of a miraculous

insulating material, which had been used on rocket ships to the Moon.

This was, in fact, the same material which gave the aluminum siding

of Dwayne Hoover’s dream house in Midland City its miraculous

insulating qualities.

The manager reminded Trout of what the first man to set foot on the

Moon had said: “One small step for man, one great leap for mankind.”

“Thrilling words,” said Trout. He looked over his shoulder, perceived

that they were being followed by a white Olds-mobile Toronado with a

black vinyl roof. This four hundred horsepower, front-wheel drive

vehicle was burbling along at about three miles an hour, ten feet

behind them and close to the curb.

That was the last thing Trout remembered—seeing the Oldsmobile

back there.

The next thing he knew, he was on his hands and knees on a handball

court underneath the Queensboro Bridge at Fifty-ninth Street, with the

East River nearby. His trousers and underpants were around his

ankles. His money was gone. His parcels were scattered around him—

the tuxedo, the new shirt, the books. Blood seeped from one ear.

The police caught him in the act of pulling up his trousers. They

dazzled him with a spotlight as he leaned against the backboard of the

handball court and fumbled foolishly with his belt and the buttons on

his fly. The police supposed that they had caught him committing

some public nuisance, had caught him working with an old man’s

limited palette of excrement and alcohol.

He wasn’t quite penniless. There was a ten-dollar bill in the watch

pocket of his pants.

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It was determined at a hospital that Trout was not seriously hurt. He

was taken to a police station, where he was questioned. All he could

say was that he had been kidnapped by pure evil in a white

Oldsmobile. The police wanted to know how many people were in

the car, their ages, their sexes, the colors of their skins, their

manners of speech.

“For all I know, they may not even have been Earthlings,” said Trout.

“For all I know, that car may have been occupied by an intelligent gas

from Pluto.”

Trout said this so innocently, but his comment turned out to be the first

germ in an epidemic of mind-poisoning. Here is how the disease was

spread: a reporter wrote a story for the New York Post the next day,

and he led off with the quotation from Trout.

The story appeared under this headline:

PLUTO BANDITS

KIDNAP PAIR

Trout’s name was given as Kilmer Trotter, incidentally, address

unknown. His age was given as eighty-two.

Other papers copied the story, rewrote it some. They all hung on to

the joke about Pluto, spoke knowingly of The Pluto Gang. And

reporters asked police for any new information on The Pluto Gang, so

police went looking for information on The Pluto Gang.

So New Yorkers, who had so many nameless terrors, were easily

taught to fear something seemingly specific—The Pluto Gang. They

bought new locks for their doors and gratings for their windows, to

keep out The Pluto Gang. They stopped going to theaters at night, for

fear of The Pluto Gang.

Foreign newspapers spread the terror, ran articles on how persons

thinking of visiting New York might keep to a certain few streets in

Manhattan and stand a fair chance of avoiding The Pluto Gang.

In one of New York City’s many ghettos for darkskinned people, a

group of Puerto Rican boys gathered together in the basement of an

abandoned building. They were small, but they were numerous and

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volatile. They wished to become frightening, in order to defend

themselves and their friends and families, something the police

wouldn’t do. They also wanted to drive the drug peddlers out of the

neighborhood, and to get enough publicity, which was very important,

to catch the attention of the Government, so that the Government

would do a better job of picking up the garbage and so on.

One of them, Jose Méndoza, was a fairly good painter. So he painted

the emblem of their new gang on the backs of the members’ jackets.

This was it:

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Chapter 9

While Kilgore Trout was inadvertently poisoning the collective mind of

New York City, Dwayne Hoover, the demented Pontiac dealer, was

coming down from the roof of his own Holiday Inn in the Middle West.

Dwayne went into the carpeted lobby of the place not long before

sunrise, to ask for a room. As queer as the hour was, there was a man

ahead of him, and a black one at that. This was Cyprian Ukwende, the

Indaro, the physician from Nigeria, who was staying at the Inn until he

could find a suitable apartment.

Dwayne awaited his turn humbly. He had forgotten that he was a coowner of the Inn. As for staying at a place where black men stayed,

Dwayne was philosophical. He experienced a sort of bittersweet

happiness as he told himself, “Times change. Times change.”

The night clerk was new. He did not know Dwayne. He had Dwayne

fill out a registration in full. Dwayne, for his part, apologized for not

knowing what the number of his license plate was. He felt guilty

about that, even though he knew he had done nothing he should feel

guilty about.

He was elated when the clerk let him have a room key. He had

passed the test. And he adored his room. It was so new and cool and

clean. It was so neutral! It was the brother of thousands upon

thousands of rooms in Holiday Inns all over the world.

Dwayne Hoover might be confused as to what his life was all about, or

what he should do with it next. But this much he has done correctly: He

had delivered himself to an irreproachable container for a human being.

It awaited anybody. It awaited Dwayne.

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Around the toilet seat was a band of paper like this, which he would

have to remove before he used the toilet:

This loop of paper guaranteed Dwayne that he need have no fear that

corkscrew-shaped little animals would crawl up his asshole and eat up

his wiring. That was one less worry for Dwayne.

There was a sign hanging on the inside doorknob, which Dwayne now

hung on the outside doorknob. It looked like this:

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Dwayne pulled open his floor-to-ceiling draperies for a moment. He

saw the sign which announced the presence of the Inn to weary

travelers on the Interstate. Here is what it looked like:

He closed his draperies. He adjusted the heating and ventilating

system. He slept like a lamb.

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A lamb was a young animal which was legendary for sleeping well on

the planet Earth. It looked like this:

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Chapter 10

Kilgore Trout was released by the Police Department of the City of

New York like a weightless thing-at two hours before dawn on the

day after Veterans’ Day. He crossed the island of Manhattan from

east to west in the company of Kleenex tissues and newspapers

and soot.

He got a ride in a truck. It was hauling seventy-eight thousand pounds

of Spanish olives. It picked him up at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel,

which was named in honor of a man who had had the courage and

imagination to make human slavery against the law in the United

States of America. This was a recent innovation.

The slaves were simply turned loose without any property. They

were easily recognizable. They were black. They were suddenly free

to go exploring.

The driver, who was white, told Trout that he would have to lie on the

floor of the cab until they reached open country, since it was against

the law for him to pick up hitchhikers.

It was still dark when he told Trout he could sit up. They were crossing

the poisoned marshes and meadows of New Jersey. The truck was a

General Motors Astro-95 Diesel tractor, hooked up to a trailer forty

feet long. It was so enormous that it made Trout feel that his head was

about the size of a piece of bee-bee shot.

The driver said he used to be a hunter and a fisherman, long ago. It

broke his heart when he imagined what the marshes and meadows

had been like only a hundred years before. “And when you think of

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the shit that most of these factories make—wash day products,

catfood, pop—”

He had a point. The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing

processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by

and large.

Then Trout made a good point, too. “Well,” he said, “I used to be a

conservationist. I used to weep and wail about people shooting bald

eagles with automatic shotguns from helicopters and all that, but I

gave it up. There’s a river in Cleveland which is so polluted that it

catches fire about once a year. That used to make me sick, but I

laugh about it now. When some tanker accidently dumps its load

in the ocean, and kills millions of birds and billions of fish, I say, ‘More

power to Standard Oil,’ or whoever it was that dumped it.” Trout

raised his arms in celebration. “‘Up your ass with Mobil gas,’” he said.

The driver was upset by this. “You’re kidding,” he said.

“I realized,” said Trout, “that God wasn’t any conservationist, so for

anybody else to be one was sacrilegious and a waste of time. You

ever see one of His volcanoes or tornadoes or tidal waves? Anybody

ever tell you about the Ice Ages he arranges for every half-million

years? How about Dutch Elm disease? There’s a nice conservation

measure for you. That’s God, not man. Just about the time we got our

rivers cleaned up, he’d probably have the whole galaxy go up like a

celluloid collar. That’s what the Star of Bethlehem was, you know.”

“What was the Star of Bethlehem?” said the driver.

“A whole galaxy going up like a celluloid collar,” said Trout.

The driver was impressed. “Come to think about it,” he said, “I don’t

think there’s anything about conservation anywhere in the Bible.”

“Unless you want to count the story about the Flood,” said Trout.

They rode in silence for a while, and then the driver made another

good point. He said he knew that his truck was turning the

atmosphere into poison gas, and that the planet was being turned

into pavement so his truck could go anywhere. “So I’m committing

suicide,” he said.

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“Don’t worry about it,” said Trout.

“My brother is even worse,” the driver went on. “He works in a

factory that makes chemicals for killing plants and trees in Viet

Nam.” Viet Nam was a country where America was trying to

make people stop being communists by dropping things on them

from airplanes. The chemicals he mentioned were intended to kill

all the foliage, so it would be harder for communists to hide

from airplanes.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Trout.

“In the long run, he’s committing suicide,” said the driver. “Seems like

the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing

suicide in some way.”

“Good point,” said Trout.

“I can’t tell if you’re serious or not,” said the driver.

“I won’t know myself until I find out whether life is serious or not,” said

Trout. “It’s dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn’t

necessarily mean it’s serious, too.”

After Trout became famous, of course, one of the biggest mysteries

about him was whether he was kidding or not. He told one

persistent questioner that he always crossed his fingers when he

was kidding.

“And please note,” he went on, “that when I gave you that priceless

piece of information, my fingers were crossed.”

And so on.

He was a pain in the neck in a lot of ways. The truck driver got sick of

him after an hour or two. Trout used the silence to make up an

anticonservation story he called “Gilgongo!”

“Gilgongo!” was about a planet which was unpleasant because there

was too much creation going on.

The story began with a big party in honor of a man who had wiped

out an entire species of darling little panda bears. He had devoted his

life to this. Special plates were made for the party, and the guests got

to take them home as souvenirs. There was a picture of a little bear

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on each one, and the date of the party. Underneath the picture was

the word:

GILGONGO!

In the language of the planet, that meant “Extinct!”

People were glad that the bears were gilgongo, because there were too

many species on the planet already, and new ones were coming into

being almost every hour. There was no way anybody could prepare for the

bewildering diversity of creatures and plants he was likely to encounter.

The people were doing their best to cut down on the number of species,

so that life could be more predictable. But Nature was too creative for

them. All life on the planet was suffocated at last by a living blanket one

hundred feet thick. The blanket was composed of passenger pigeons

and eagles and Bermuda Erns and whooping cranes.

“At least it’s olives,” the driver said.

“What?” said Trout.

“Lots worse things we could be hauling than olives.”

“Right,” said Trout. He had forgotten that the main thing they were

doing was moving seventy-eight thousand pounds of olives to

Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The driver talked about politics some.

Trout couldn’t tell one politician from another one. They were all

formlessly enthusiastic chimpanzees to him. He wrote a story one time

about an optimistic chimpanzee who became President of the United

States. He called it “Hail to the Chief.”

The chimpanzee wore a little blue blazer with brass buttons, and with

the seal of the President of the United States sewed to the breast

pocket. It looked like this:

Everywhere he went, bands would play “Hail to the Chief.” The

chimpanzee loved it. He would bounce up and down.

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They stopped at a diner. Here is what the sign in front of the diner said:

So they ate.

Trout spotted an idiot who was eating, too. The idiot was a white male

adult—in the care of a white female nurse. The idiot couldn’t talk

much, and he had a lot of trouble feeding himself. The nurse put a bib

around his neck.

But he certainly had a wonderful appetite. Trout watched him shovel

waffles and pork sausage into his mouth, watched him guzzle orange

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juice and milk. Trout marveled at what a big animal the idiot was. The

idiot’s happiness was fascinating, too, as he stoked himself with

calories which would get him through yet another day.

Trout said this to himself: “Stoking up for another day.”

“Excuse me,” said the truck driver to Trout, “I’ve got to take a leak.”

“Back where I come from,” said Trout, “that means you’re going to

steal a mirror. We call mirrors leaks.”

“I never heard that before,” said the driver. He repeated the word:

“Leaks.” He pointed to a mirror on a cigarette machine. “You call that

a leak?”

“Doesn’t it look like a leak to you?” said Trout.

“No,” said the driver. “Where did you say you were from?”

“I was born in Bermuda,” said Trout.

About a week later, the driver would tell his wife that mirrors were

called leaks in Bermuda, and she would tell her friends.

When Trout followed the driver back to the truck, he took his first good

look at their form of transportation from a distance, saw it whole.

There was a message written on the side of it in bright orange letters

which were eight feet high. This was it:

Trout wondered what a child who was just learning to read would

make of a message like that. The child would suppose that the

message was terrifically important, since somebody had gone to the

trouble of writing it in letters so big.

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And then, pretending to be a child by the roadside, he read the

message on the side of another truck. This was it:

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Chapter 11

Dwayne Hoover slept until ten at the new Holiday Inn. He was much

refreshed. He had a Number Five Breakfast in the popular

restaurant of the Inn, which was the Tally-Ho Room. The drapes

were drawn at night. They were wide open now. They let the

sunshine in.

At the next table, also alone, was Cyprian Ukwende, the Indaro, the

Nigerian. He was reading the classified ads in the Midland City Bugle-

Observer. He needed a cheap place to live. The Midland County

General Hospital was footing his bills at the Inn while he looked

around, and they were getting restless about that.

He needed a woman, too, or a bunch of women who would fuck him

hundreds of times a week, because he was so full of lust and jism all

the time. And he ached to be with his Indaro relatives. Back home, he

had six hundred relatives he knew by name.

Ukwende’s face was impassive as he ordered the Number Three

Breakfast with whole-wheat toast. Behind his mask was a young man

in the terminal stages of nostalgia and lover’s nuts.

Dwayne Hoover, six feet away, gazed out at the busy, sunny

Interstate Highway. He knew where he was. There was a familiar

moat between the parking lot of the Inn and the Interstate, a concrete

trough which the engineers had built to contain Sugar Creek. Next

came a familiar resilient steel barrier which prevented cars and trucks

from tumbling into Sugar Creek. Next came the three familiar westbound lanes, and then the familiar grassy median divider. After that

came the three familiar east-bound lanes, and then another familiar

steel barrier. After that came the familiar Will Fairchild Memorial

Airport—and then the familiar farmlands beyond.

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It was certainly flat out there—flat city, flat township, flat county, flat

state. When Dwayne was a little boy, he had supposed that almost

everybody lived in places that were treeless and flat. He imagined

that oceans and mountains and forests were mainly sequestered in

state and national parks. In the third grade, little Dwayne scrawled an

essay which argued in favor of creating a national park at a bend in

Sugar Creek, the only significant surface water within eight miles of

Midland City.

Dwayne said the name of that familiar surface water to himself now,

silently: “Sugar Creek.”

Sugar Creek was only two inches deep and fifty yards wide at the

bend, where little Dwayne thought the park should be. Now they had

put the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts there instead. It

was beautiful.

Dwayne fiddled with his lapel for a moment, felt a badge pinned

there. He unpinned it, having no recollection of what it said. It was a

boost for the Arts Festival, which would begin that evening. All over

town people were wearing badges like Dwayne’s. Here is what the

badges said:

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Sugar Creek flooded now and then. Dwayne remembered about that.

In a land so flat, flooding was a queerly pretty thing for water to do.

Sugar Creek brimmed over silently, formed a vast mirror in which

children might safely play.

The mirror showed the citizens the shape of the valley they lived in,

demonstrated that they were hill people who inhabited slopes rising

one inch for every mile that separated them from Sugar Creek.

Dwayne silently said the name of the water again: “Sugar Creek.”

Dwayne finished his breakfast, and he dared to suppose that he was

no longer mentally diseased, that he had been cured by a simple

change of residence, by a good night’s sleep.

His bad chemicals let him cross the lobby and then the cocktail lounge,

which wasn’t open yet, without experiencing anything strange. But when

he stepped out of the side door of the cocktail lounge, and onto the

asphalt prairie which surrounded both his Inn and his Pontiac agency, he

discovered that someone had turned the asphalt into a sort of trampoline.

It sank beneath Dwayne’s weight. It dropped Dwayne to well below

street level, then slowly brought him only partway up again. He was in

a shallow, rubbery dimple. Dwayne took another step in the direction

of his automobile agency. He sank down again, came up again, and

stood in a brand new dimple.

He gawked around for witnesses. There was only one. Cyprian Ukwende

stood on the rim of the dimple, not sinking in. This was all Ukwende had to say,

even though Dwayne’s situation was extraordinary:

“Nice day.”

Dwayne progressed from dimple to dimple.

He blooped across the used car lot now.

He stopped in a dimple, looked up at another young black man. This

one was polishing a maroon 1970 Buick Skylark convertible with a

rag. The man wasn’t dressed for that sort of work. He wore a cheap

blue suit and a white shirt and a black necktie. Also: he wasn’t merely

polishing the car—he was burnishing it.

The young man did some more burnishing. Then he smiled at Dwayne

blindingly, then he burnished the car again.

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Here was the explanation: this young black man had just been paroled

from the Adult Correctional Institution at Shepherdstown. He needed

work right away, or he would starve to death. So he was showing

Dwayne how hard a worker he was.

He had been in orphanages and youth shelters and prisons of one

sort or another in the Midland City area since he was nine years old.

He was now twenty-six.

He was free at last!

Dwayne thought the young man was an hallucination.

The young man went back to burnishing the automobile. His life was

not worth living. He had a feeble will to survive. He thought the planet

was terrible, that he never should have been sent there. Some

mistake had been made. He had no friends or relatives. He was put in

cages all the time.

He had a name for a better world, and he often saw it in dreams. Its

name was a secret. He would have been ridiculed, if he had said its

name out loud. It was such a childish name.

The young black jailbird could see the name any time he wanted to,

written in lights on the inside of his skull. This is what it looked like:

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He had a photograph of Dwayne in his wallet. He used to have

photographs of Dwayne on the walls of his cell at Shepherdstown.

They were easy to get, because Dwayne’s smiling face, with his motto

underneath, was a part of every ad he ran in the Bugle-Observer. The

picture was changed every six months. The motto hadn’t varied in

twenty-five years.

Here was the motto:

ASK ANYBODY—

YOU CAN TRUST

DWAYNE.

The young ex-convict smiled yet again at Dwayne. His teeth were in

perfect repair. The dental program at Shepherdstown was excellent.

So was the food.

“Good morning, sir,” said the young man to Dwayne. He was

dismayingly innocent. There was so much he had to learn. He didn’t

know anything about women, for instance. Francine Pefko was the

first woman he had spoken to in eleven years.

“Good morning,” said Dwayne. He said it softly, so his voice wouldn’t

carry very far, in case he was conversing with an hallucination.

“Sir—I have read your ads in the newspapers with great interest, and I

have found pleasure in your radio advertising, too,” the parolee said.

During the last year in prison, he had been obsessed by one idea: that

he would work for Dwayne someday, and live happily ever after. It

would be like Fairyland.

Dwayne made no reply to this, so the young man went on: “I am a

very hard worker, sir, as you can see. I hear nothing but good things

about you. I think the good Lord meant for me to work for you.”

“Oh?” said Dwayne.

“Our names are so close,” said the young man, “it’s the good Lord

telling us both what to do.”

Dwayne Hoover didn’t ask him what his name was, but the young man

told him anyway, radiantly: “My name, sir, is Wayne Hoobler.”

All around Midland City, Hoobler was a common Nigger name.

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Dwayne Hoover broke Wayne Hoobler’s heart by shaking his head

vaguely, then walking away.

Dwayne entered his showroom. The ground wasn’t blooping

underneath him anymore, but now he saw something else for which

there could be no explanation: A palm tree was growing out of the

showroom floor. Dwayne’s bad chemicals made him forget all about

Hawaiian Week. Actually, Dwayne had designed the palm tree

himself. It was a sawed-off telephone pole—swaddled in burlap. It had

real coconuts nailed to the top of it. Sheets of green plastic had been

cut to resemble leaves.

The tree so bewildered Dwayne that he almost swooned. Then he

looked around and saw pineapples and ukuleles scattered everywhere.

And then he saw the most unbelievable thing of all: His sales

manager, Harry LeSabre, came toward him leeringly, wearing a

lettuce-green leotard, straw sandals, a grass skirt, and a pink T-shirt

which looked like this:

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Harry and his wife had spent all weekend arguing about whether or

not Dwayne suspected that Harry was a transvestite. They concluded

that Dwayne had no reason to suspect it. Harry never talked about

women’s clothes to Dwayne. He had never entered a transvestite

beauty contest or done what a lot of transvestites in Midland City did,

which was join a big transvestite club over in Cincinnati. He never

went into the city’s transvestite bar, which was Ye Old Rathskeller, in

the basement of the Fairchild Hotel. He had never exchanged Polaroid

pictures with any other transvestites, had never subscribed to a

transvestite magazine.

Harry and his wife concluded that Dwayne had meant nothing more

than what he said, that Harry had better put on some wild clothes for

Hawaiian Week, or Dwayne would can him.

So here was the new Harry now, rosy with fear and excitement. He felt

uninhibited and beautiful and lovable and suddenly free.

He greeted Dwayne with the Hawaiian word which meant both hello

and goodbye. “Aloha,” he said.

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Chapter 12

Kilgore Trout was far away, but he was steadily closing the distance

between himself and Dwayne. He was still in the truck named

Pyramid. It was crossing a bridge named in honor of the poet Walt

Whitman. The bridge was veiled in smoke. The truck was about to

become a part of Philadelphia now. A sign at the foot of the bridge

said this:

As a younger man, Trout would have sneered at the sign about

brotherhood—posted on the rim of a bomb crater, as anyone could

see. But his head no longer sheltered ideas of how things could be

and should be on the planet, as opposed to how they really were.

There was only one way for the Earth to be, he thought: the way

it was.

Everything was necessary. He saw an old white woman fishing

through a garbage can. That was necessary. He saw a bathtub toy, a

little rubber duck, lying on its side on the grating over a storm sewer. It

had to be there.

And so on.

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The driver mentioned that the day before had been Veterans’ Day.

“Um,” said Trout.

“You a veteran?” said the driver.

“No,” said Trout. “Are you?”

“No,” said the driver.

Neither one of them was a veteran.

The driver got onto the subject of friends. He said it was hard for

him to maintain friendships that meant anything because he was

on the road most of the time. He joked about the time when he used

to talk about his “best friends.” He guessed people stopped talking

about best friends after they got out of junior high school.

He suggested that Trout, since Trout was in the combination

aluminum storm window and screen business, had opportunities to

build many lasting friendships in the course of his work. “I mean,” he

said, “you get men working together day after day, putting up those

windows, they get to know each other pretty well.”

“I work alone,” said Trout.

The driver was disappointed. “I assumed it would take two men to do

the job.”

“Just one,” said Trout. “A weak little kid could do it without any help.”

The driver wanted Trout to have a rich social life so that he could

enjoy it vicariously. “All the same,” he insisted, “you’ve got buddies

you see after work. You have a few beers. You play some cards. You

have some laughs.”

Trout shrugged.

“You walk down the same streets every day,” the driver told him. “You

know a lot of people, and they know you, because it’s the same

streets for you, day after day. You say, ‘Hello,’ and they say ‘Hello,’

back. You call them by name. They call you by name. If you’re in a

real jam, they’ll help you, because you’re one of ‘em. You belong.

They see you every day.”

Trout didn’t want to argue about it.

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Trout had forgotten the driver’s name.

Trout had a mental defect which I, too, used to suffer from. He couldn’t

remember what different people in his life looked like—unless their

bodies or faces were strikingly unusual.

When he lived on Cape Cod, for instance, the only person he could greet

warmly and by name was Alfy Bearse, who was a one-armed albino.

“Hot enough for you, Alfy?” he would say. “Where you been keeping

yourself, Alfy?” he’d say. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, Alfy,” he’d say.

And so on.

Now that Trout lived in Cohoes, the only person he called by name

was a red-headed Cockney midget, Durling Heath. He worked in a

shoe repair shop. Heath had an executive-type nameplate on his

workbench, in case anybody wished to address him by name. The

nameplate looked like this:

Trout would drop into the shop from time to time, and say such things

as, “Who’s gonna win the World Series this year, Durling?” and “You

have any idea what all the sirens were blowing about last night,

Durling?” and, “You’re looking good today, Durling—where’d you get

that shirt?” And so on.

Trout wondered now if his friendship with Heath was over. The last

time Trout had been in the shoe repair place, saying this and that to

Durling, the midget had unexpectedly screamed at him.

This is what he had screamed in his Cockney accent: “Stop bloody

hounding me!”

The Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, shook Trout’s hand

in a Cohoes grocery story one time. Trout had no idea who he was.

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As a science-fiction writer, he should have been flabbergasted to

come so close to such a man. Rockefeller wasn’t merely Governor.

Because of the peculiar laws in that part of the planet, Rockefeller

was allowed to own vast areas of Earth’s surface, and the petroleum

and other valuable minerals underneath the surface, as well. He

owned or controlled more of the planet than many nations. This had

been his destiny since infancy. He had been born into that

cockamamie proprietorship.

“How’s it going, fella?” Governor Rockefeller asked him.

“About the same,” said Kilgore Trout.

After insisting that Trout had a rich social life, the driver pretended,

again for his own gratification, that Trout had begged to know what the

sex life of a transcontinental truck driver was like. Trout had begged

no such thing.

“You want to know how truck drivers make out with women, right?” the

driver said. “You have this idea that every driver you see is fucking up

a storm from coast to coast, right?”

Trout shrugged.

The truck driver became embittered by Trout, scolded him for being so

salaciously misinformed. “Let me tell you, Kilgore—” he hesitated.

“That’s your name, right?”

“Yes,” said Trout. He had forgotten the driver’s name a hundred times.

Every time Trout looked away from him, Trout forgot not only his name

but his face, too.

“Kilgore, God damn it—” the driver said, “if I was to have my rig break

down in Cohoes, for instance, and I was to have to stay there for two

days while it was worked on, how easy you think it would be for me to

get laid while I was there—a stranger, looking the way I do?”

“It would depend on how determined you were,” said Trout.

The driver sighed. “Yeah, God—” he said, and he despaired for

himself, “that’s probably the story of my life: not enough determination.”

They talked about aluminum siding as a technique for making old

houses look new again. From a distance, these sheets, which never

needed painting, looked like freshly painted wood.

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The driver wanted to talk about Perma-Stone, too, which was a

competitive scheme. It involved plastering the sides of old houses with

colored cement, so that, from a distance, they looked as though they

were made of stone.

“If you’re in aluminum storm windows,” the driver said to Trout, “you

must be in aluminum siding, too.” All over the country, the two

businesses went hand-in-hand.

“My company sells it,” said Trout, “and I’ve seen a lot of it. I’ve never

actually worked on an installation.”

The driver was thinking seriously of buying aluminum siding for his

home in Little Rock, and he begged Trout to give him an honest

answer to this question: “From what you’ve seen and heard—the

people who get aluminum siding, are they happy with what they get?”

“Around Cohoes,” said Trout. “I think those were about the only really

happy people I ever saw.”

“I know what you mean,” said the driver. “One time I saw a whole family

standing outside their house. They couldn’t believe how nice their house

looked after the aluminum siding went on. My question to you, and you

can give me an honest answer, on account of we’ll never have to do

business, you and me: Kilgore, how long will that happiness last?”

“About fifteen years,” said Trout. “Our salesmen say you can easily

afford to have the job redone with all the money you’ve saved on paint

and heat.”

“Perma-Stone looks a lot richer, and I suppose it lasts a lot longer,

too,” said the driver. “On the other hand, it costs a lot more.”

“You get what you pay for,” said Kilgore Trout.

The truck driver told Trout about a gas hot-water heater he had

bought thirty years ago, and it hadn’t given him a speck of trouble in

all that time.

“I’ll be damned,” said Kilgore Trout.

Trout asked about the truck, and the driver said it was the greatest

truck in the world. The tractor alone cost twenty-eight thousand dollars.

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It was powered by a three hundred and twenty-four horsepower

Cummins Diesel engine, which was turbo-charged, so it would function

well at high altitudes. It had hydraulic steering, air brakes, a thirteenspeed transmission, and was owned by his brother-inlaw.

His brother-in-law, he said, owned twenty-eight trucks, and was

President of the Pyramid Trucking Company.

“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?”

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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.

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Chapter 13

When Dwayne Hoover saw Harry LeSabre, his sales manager, in leafgreen 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

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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:

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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

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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 pingpong 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.

Lyle told Dwayne about an experiment he and Kyle had performed the

night before. They had gone into the cave with their identical Browning

Automatic Shotguns, and they had opened fire on the advancing wall

of bubbles.

“They let loose a stink you wouldn’t believe,” said Lyle. He said it

smelled like athlete’s foot. “It drove me and Kyle right out of there. We

run the ventilating system for an hour, and then we went back in. The

paint was blistered on Moby Dick. He ain’t even got eyes anymore.”

Moby Dick used to have long-lashed blue eyes as big as dinner plates.

“The organ turned black, and the ceiling turned a kind of dirty yellow,”

said Lyle. “You can’t hardly see the Sacred Miracle no more.”

The organ was the Pipe Organ of the Gods, a thicket of

stalactites and stalagmites which had grown together in one

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corner of the Cathedral. There was a loudspeaker in back of it,

through which music for weddings and funerals was played. It

was illuminated by electric lights, which changed colors all

the time.

The Sacred Miracle was a cross on the ceiling of the Cathedral. It

was formed by the intersection of two cracks. “It never was real

easy to see,” said Lyle, speaking of the cross. “I ain’t even sure it’s

there anymore.” He asked Dwayne’s permission to order a load of

cement. He wanted to plug up the passage between the stream and

the Cathedral.

“Just forget about Moby Dick and Jesse James and the slaves and all

that,” said Lyle, “and save the Cathedral.”

Jesse James was a skeleton which Dwayne’s stepfather had bought

from the estate of a doctor back during the Great Depression. The

bones of its right hand mingled with the rusted parts of a.45 caliber

revolver. Tourists were told that it had been found that way, that it

probably belonged to some railroad robber who had been trapped in

the cave by a rockslide.

As for the slaves: these were plaster statues of black men in a

chamber fifty feet down the corridor from Jesse James. The statues

were removing one another’s chains with hammers and hacksaws.

Tourists were told that real slaves had at one time used the cave after

escaping to freedom across the Ohio River.

The story about the slaves was as fake as the one about Jesse

James. The cave wasn’t discovered until 1937, when a small

earthquake opened it up a crack. Dwayne Hoover himself

discovered the crack, and then he and his stepfather opened it with

crowbars and dynamite. Before that, not even small animals had

been in there.

The only connection the cave had with slavery was this: the farm on

which it was discovered was started by an exslave, Josephus Hoobler.

He was freed by his master, and he came north and started the farm.

Then he went back and bought his mother and a woman who became

his wife.

Their descendants continued to run the farm until the Great

Depression, when the Midland County Merchants Bank foreclosed

on the mortgage. And then Dwayne’s stepfather was hit by an

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automobile driven by a white man who had bought the farm. In

an out-of-court settlement for his injuries, Dwayne’s stepfather

was given what he called contemptuously “. . . a God damn

Nigger farm.”

Dwayne remembered the first trip the family took to see it. His father

ripped a Nigger sign off the Nigger mailbox, and he threw it into a

ditch. Here is what it said:

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Chapter 14

The truck carrying Kilgore Trout was in West Virginia now. The

surface of the State had been demolished by men and machinery and

explosives in order to make it yield up its coal. The coal was mostly

gone now. It had been turned into heat.

The surface of West Virginia, with its coal and trees and topsoil gone,

was rearranging what was left of itself in conformity with the laws of

gravity. It was collapsing into all the holes which had been dug into it.

Its mountains, which had once found it easy to stand by themselves,

were sliding into valleys now.

The demolition of West Virginia had taken place with the approval of

the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the State

Government, which drew their power from the people.

Here and there an inhabited dwelling still stood.

Trout saw a broken guardrail ahead. He gazed into a gully below it,

saw a 1968 Cadillac El Dorado capsized in a brook. It had Alabama

license plates. There were also several old home appliances in the

brook—stoves, a washing machine, a couple of refrigerators.

An angel-faced white child, with flaxen hair, stood by the brook. She

waved up at Trout. She clasped an eighteenounce bottle of Pepsi-

Cola to her breast.

Trout asked himself out loud what the people did for amusement, and

the driver told him a queer story about a night he spent in West

Virginia, in the cab of his truck, near a windowless building which

droned monotonously.

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“I’d see folks go in, and I’d see folks come out,” he said, “but I couldn’t

figure out what kind of a machine it was that made the drone. The

building was a cheap old frame thing set up on cement blocks, and it

was out in the middle of nowhere. Cars came and went, and the folks

sure seemed to like whatever was doing the droning,” he said.

So he had a look inside. “It was full of folks on rollerskates,” he said.

“They went around and around. Nobody smiled. They just went

around and around.”

He told Trout about people he’d heard of in the area who grabbed live

copperheads and rattlesnakes during church services, to show how

much they believed that Jesus would protect them.

“Takes all kinds of people to make up a world,” said Trout.

Trout marveled at how recently white men had arrived in West

Virginia, and how quickly they had demolished it—for heat.

Now the heat was all gone, too—into outer space, Trout supposed. It

had boiled water, and the steam had made steel windmills whiz around

and around. The windmills had made rotors in generators whiz around

and around. America was jazzed with electricity for a while. Coal had

also powered old-fashioned steamboats and choo-choo trains.

Choo-choo trains and steamboats and factories had whistles which

were blown by steam when Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout and I

were boys—when our fathers were boys, when our grandfathers were

boys. The whistles looked like this:

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Steam from water boiled by burning coal was sent raging through the

whistles, which made harshly beautiful laments, as though they were

the voice boxes of mating or dying dinosaurs—cries such as

woooooooo-uh, wooooo-uh, and torrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnnn,

and so on.

A dinosaur was a reptile as big as a choo-choo train. It looked like this:

It had two brains, one for its front end and one for its rear end. It was

extinct. Both brains combined were smaller than a pea. A pea was a

legume which looked like this:

Coal was a highly compressed mixture of rotten trees and flowers and

bushes and grasses and so on, and dinosaur excrement.

Kilgore Trout thought about the cries of steam whistles he had known,

and about the destruction of West Virginia, which made their songs

possible. He supposed that the heartrending cries had fled into outer

space, along with the heat. He was mistaken.

Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about

science, was bored stiff by technical details. But no cry from a whistle

had got very far from Earth for this reason: sound could only travel in

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an atmosphere, and the atmosphere of Earth relative to the planet

wasn’t even as thick as the skin of an apple. Beyond that lay an allbut-perfect vacuum.

An apple was a popular fruit which looked like this:

The driver was a big eater. He pulled into a MacDonald’s Hamburger

establishment. There were many different chains of hamburger

establishments in the country. MacDonald’s was one. Burger Chef

was another. Dwayne Hoover, as has already been said, owned

franchises for several Burger Chefs.

A hamburger was made out of an animal which looked like this:

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The animal was killed and ground up into little bits, then shaped into

patties and fried, and put between two pieces of bread. The finished

product looked like this:

And Trout, who had so little money left, ordered a cup of coffee. He

asked an old, old man on a stool next to him at the table if he had

worked in the coal mines.

The old man said this: “From the time I was ten till I was sixty-two.”

“You glad to be out of ‘em?” said Trout.

“Oh, God,” said the man, “you never get out of ‘em—even when you

sleep. I dream mines.”

Trout asked him what it had felt like to work for an industry whose

business was to destroy the countryside, and the old man said he was

usually too tired to care.

“Don’t matter if you care,” the old miner said, “if you don’t own what

you care about.” He pointed out that the mineral rights to the entire

county in which they sat were owned by the Rosewater Coal and Iron

Company, which had acquired these rights soon after the end of the

Civil War. “The law says,” he went on, “when a man owns something

under the ground and he wants to get at it, you got to let him tear up

anything between the surface and what he owns.”

Trout did not make the connection between the Rosewater Coal and

Iron Company and Eliot Rosewater, his only fan. He still thought Eliot

Rosewater was a teenager.

The truth was that Rosewater’s ancestors had been among the

principal destroyers of the surface and the people of West Virginia.

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“It don’t seem right, though,” the old miner said to Trout, “that a man

can own what’s underneath another man’s farm or woods or house.

And any time the man wants to get what’s underneath all that, he’s got

a right to wreck what’s on top to get at it. The rights of the people on

top of the ground don’t amount to nothing compared to the rights of

the man who owns what’s underneath.”

He remembered out loud when he and other miners used to try to

force the Rosewater Coal and Iron Company to treat them like human

beings. They would fight small wars with the company’s private police

and the State Police and the National Guard.

“I never saw a Rosewater,” he said, “but Rosewater always won. I

walked on Rosewater. I dug holes for Rosewater in Rosewater. I lived

in Rosewater houses. I ate Rosewater food. I’d fight Rosewater,

whatever Rosewater is, and Rosewater would beat me and leave me

for dead. You ask people around here and they’ll tell you: this whole

world is Rosewater as far as they’re concerned.”

The driver knew Trout was bound for Midland City. He didn’t know

Trout was a writer on his way to an arts festival. Trout understood that

honest working people had no use for the arts.

“Why would anybody in his right mind go to Midland City?” the driver

wanted to know. They were riding along again.

“My sister is sick,” said Trout.

“Midland City is the asshole of the Universe,” said the driver.

“I’ve often wondered where the asshole was,” said Trout.

“If it isn’t in Midland City,” said the driver, “it’s in Libertyville, Georgia.

You ever see Libertyville?”

“No,” said Trout.

“I was arrested for speeding down there. They had a speed trap,

where you all of a sudden had to go from fifty down to fifteen miles an

hour. It made me mad. I had some words with the policeman, and he

put me in jail.

“The main industry there was pulping up old newspapers and

magazines and books, and making new paper out of ‘em,” said the

driver. “Trucks and trains were bringing in hundreds of tons of

unwanted printed material every day.”

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“Um,” said Trout.

“And the unloading process was sloppy, so there were pieces of

books and magazines and so on blowing all over town. If you wanted

to start a library, you could just go over to the freight yard, and carry

away all the books you wanted.”

“Um,” said Trout. Up ahead was a white man hitchhiking with his

pregnant wife and nine children.

“Looks like Gary Cooper, don’t he?” said the truck driver of the

hitchhiking man.

“Yes, he does,” said Trout. Gary Cooper was a movie star.

“Anyway,” said the driver, “they had so many books in Libertyville, they

used books for toilet paper in the jail. They got me on a Friday, late in

the afternoon, so I couldn’t have a hearing in court until Monday. So I

sat there in the calaboose for two days, with nothing to do but read my

toilet paper. I can still remember one of the stories I read.”

“Um,” said Trout.

“That was the last story I ever read,” said the driver. “My God—that

must be all of fifteen years ago. The story was about another planet. It

was a crazy story. They had museums full of paintings all over the

place, and the government used a kind of roulette wheel to decide

what to put in the museums, and what to throw out.”

Kilgore Trout was suddenly woozy with déjà vu. The truck driver

was reminding him of the premise of a book he hadn’t thought about

for years. The driver’s toilet paper in Libertyville, Georgia, had been

The Barring-gaffner of Bagnialto, or This Year’s Masterpiece, by

Kilgore Trout.

The name of the planet where Trout’s book took place was

Bagnialto, and a “Barring-gaffner” there was a government official

who spun a wheel of chance once a year. Citizens submitted works

of art to the government, and these were given numbers, and then

they were assigned cash values according to the Barring-gaffner’s

spins of the wheel.

The viewpoint of character of the tale was not the Barring-gaffner, but

a humble cobbler named Gooz. Gooz lived alone, and he painted a

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picture of his cat. It was the only picture he had ever painted. He took

it to the Barring-gaffner, who numbered it and put it in a warehouse

crammed with works of art.

The painting by Gooz had an unprecedented gush of luck on the

wheel. It became worth eighteen thousand lambos, the equivalent of

one billion dollars on Earth. The Barring-gaffner awarded Gooz a

check for that amount, most of which was taken back at once by the

tax collector. The picture was given a place of honor in the National

Gallery, and people lined up for miles for a chance to see a painting

worth a billion dollars.

There was also a huge bonfire of all the paintings and statues and

books and so on which the wheel had said were worthless. And then it

was discovered that the wheel was rigged, and the Barring-gaffner

committed suicide.

It was an amazing coincidence that the truck driver had read a book

by Kilgore Trout. Trout had never met a reader before, and his

response now was interesting: He did not admit that he was the father

of the book.

The driver pointed out that all the mailboxes in the area had the same

last name painted on them.

“There’s another one,” he said, indicating a mailbox which looked

like this:

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The truck was passing through the area where Dwayne Hoover’s

stepparents had come from. They had trekked from West Virginia to

Midland City during the First World War, to make big money at the

Keedsler Automobile Company, which was manufacturing airplanes

and trucks. When they got to Midland City, they had their name

changed legally from Hoobler to Hoover, because there were so many

black people in Midland City named Hoobler.

As Dwayne Hoover’s stepfather explained to him one time, “It was

embarrassing. Everybody up here naturally assumed Hoobler was

a Nigger name.”

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Chapter 15

Dwayne Hoover got through lunch all right that day. He remembered

now about Hawaiian Week. The ukuleles and so on were no longer

mysterious. The pavement between his automobile agency and the

new Holiday Inn was no longer a trampoline.

He drove to lunch alone in an air-conditioned demonstrator, a blue

Pontiac Le Mans with a cream interior, with his radio on. He heard

several of his own radio commercials, which drove home the point:

“You can always trust Dwayne.”

Though his mental health had improved remarkably since breakfast, a

new symptom of illness made itself known. It was incipient echolalia.

Dwayne found himself wanting to repeat out loud whatever had just

been said.

So when the radio told him, “You can always trust Dwayne,” he

echoed the last word. “Dwayne,” he said.

When the radio said there had been a tornado in Texas, Dwayne said

this out loud: “Texas.”

Then he heard that husbands of women who had been raped during

the war between India and Pakistan wouldn’t have anything to do with

their wives anymore. The women, in the eyes of their husbands, had

become unclean, said the radio.

“Unclean,” said Dwayne.

As for Wayne Hoobler, the black ex-convict whose only dream was to

work for Dwayne Hoover: he had learned to play hide-and-seek with

Dwayne’s employees. He did not wish to be ordered off the property

for hanging around the used cars. So, when an employee came near,

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Wayne would wander off to the garbage and trash area behind the

Holiday Inn, and gravely study the remains of club sandwiches and

empty packs of Salem cigarettes and so on in the cans back there, as

though he were a health inspector or some such thing.

When the employee went away, Wayne would drift back to the used

cars, keeping the boiled eggs of his eyes peeled for the real

Dwayne Hoover.

The real Dwayne Hoover, of course, had in effect denied that he was

Dwayne. So, when the real Dwayne came out at lunch time, Wayne,

who had nobody to talk to but himself, said this to himself: “That ain’t

Mr. Hoover. Sure look like Mr. Hoover, though. Maybe Mr. Hoover sick

today.” And so on.

Dwayne had a hamburger and French fries and a Coke at his newest

Burger Chef, which was out on Crestview Avenue, across the street

from where the new John F. Kennedy High School was going up. John

F. Kennedy had never been in Midland City, but he was a President of

the United States who was shot to death. Presidents of the country

were often shot to death. The assassins were confused by some of

the same bad chemicals which troubled Dwayne.

Dwayne certainly wasn’t alone, as far as having bad chemicals inside

of him was concerned. He had plenty of company throughout all

history. In his own lifetime, for instance, the people in a country called

Germany were so full of bad chemicals for a while that they actually

built factories whose only purpose was to kill people by the millions.

The people were delivered by railroad trains.

When the Germans were full of bad chemicals, their flag looked like this:

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Here is what their flag looked like after they got well again:

After they got well again, they manufactured a cheap and durable

automobile which became popular all over the world, especially

among young people. It looked like this:

People called it “the beetle.” A real beetle looked like this:

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The mechanical beetle was made by Germans. The real beetle was

made by the Creator of the Universe.

Dwayne’s waitress at the Burger Chef was a seventeen-year-old white

girl named’ Patty Keene. Her hair was yellow. Her eyes were blue.

She was very old for a mammal. Most mammals were senile or dead

by the time they were seventeen. But Patty was a sort of mammal

which developed very slowly, so the body she rode around in was only

now mature.

She was a brand-new adult, who was working in order to pay off

the tremendous doctors’ and hospital bills her father had run up

in the process of dying of cancer of the colon and then cancer of

the everything.

This was in a country where everybody was expected to pay his own

bills for everything, and one of the most expensive things a person

could do was get sick. Patty Keene’s father’s sickness cost ten times

as much as all the trips to Hawaii which Dwayne was going to give

away at the end of Hawaiian Week.

Dwayne appreciated Patty Keene’s brand-newness, even though he

was not sexually attracted to women that young. She was like a new

automobile, which hadn’t even had its radio turned on yet, and

Dwayne was reminded of a ditty his father would sing sometimes

when his father was drunk. It went like this:

Roses are red,

And ready for plucking.

You’re sixteen,

And ready for high school.

Patty Keene was stupid on purpose, which was the case with most

women in Midland City. The women all had big minds because they

were big animals, but they did not use them much for this reason:

unusual ideas could make enemies, and the women, if they were

going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends

they could get.

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So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing

machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was

to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought

that, too.

Patty knew who Dwayne was. Dwayne didn’t know who Patty was.

Patty’s heart beat faster when she waited on him—because Dwayne

could solve so many of her problems with the money and power he

had. He could give her a fine house and new automobiles and nice

clothes and a life of leisure, and he could pay all the medical bills—as

easily as she had given him his hamburger and his French fries and

his Coke.

Dwayne could do for her what the Fairy Godmother did for Cinderella,

if he wanted to, and Patty had never been so close to such a magical

person before. She was in the presence of the supernatural. And she

knew enough about Midland City and herself to understand that she

might never be this close to the supernatural ever again.

Patty Keene actually imagined Dwayne’s waving a magic wand at her

troubles and dreams. It looked like this:

She spoke up bravely, to learn if supernatural assistance was possible

in her case. She was willing to do without it, expected to do without

it—to work hard all her life, to get not much in return, and to associate

with other men and women who were poor and powerless, and in

debt. She said this to Dwayne:

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“Excuse me for calling you by name, Mr. Hoover, but I can’t help

knowing who you are, with your picture in all your ads and everything.

Besides—everybody else who works here told me who you were.

When you came in, they just buzzed and buzzed.”

“Buzzed,” said Dwayne. This was his echolalia again.

“I guess that isn’t the right word,” she said. She was used to

apologizing for her use of language. She had been encouraged to do

a lot of that in school. Most white people in Midland City were insecure

when they spoke, so they kept their sentences short and their words

simple, in order to keep embarrassing mistakes to a minimum.

Dwayne certainly did that. Patty certainly did that.

This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their

ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to

speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they

were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if

they couldn’t love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems

and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe.

The black people would not put up with this. They went on talking

English every which way. They refused to read books they couldn’t

understand—on the grounds they couldn’t understand them. They

would ask such impudent questions as, “Whuffo I want to read no Tale

of Two Cities? Whuffo?”

Patty Keene flunked English during the semester when she had to

read and appreciate Ivanhoe, which was about men in iron suits

and the women who loved them. And she was put in a remedial

reading class, where they made her read The Good Earth, which

was about Chinamen.

It was during this same semester that she lost her virginity. She was

raped by a white gas-conversion unit installer named Don Breedlove

in the parking lot outside the Bannister Memorial Fieldhouse at the

County Fairgrounds after the Regional High School Basketball

Playoffs. She never reported it to the police. She never reported it to

anybody, since her father was dying at the time.

There was enough trouble already.

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The Bannister Memorial Fieldhouse was named in honor of George

Hickman Bannister, a seventeen-year-old boy who was killed while

playing high school football in 1924. George Hickman Bannister had

the largest tombstone in Calvary Cemetery, a sixty-two-foot obelisk

with a marble football on top.

The marble football looked like this:

Football was a war game. Two opposing teams fought over the ball

while wearing armor made out of leather and cloth and plastic.

George Hickman Bannister was killed while trying to get a hold of the

ball on Thanksgiving Day. Thanksgiving Day was a holiday when

everybody in the country was expected to express gratitude to the

Creator of the Universe, mainly for food.

George Hickman Bannister’s obelisk was paid for by public

subscription, with the Chamber of Commerce matching every two

dollars raised with a dollar of its own. It was for many years the tallest

structure in Midland City. A city ordinance was passed which made it

illegal to erect anything taller than that, and it was called The George

Hickman Bannister Law.

The ordinance was junked later on to allow radio towers to go up.

The two largest monuments in town, until the new Mildred Barry

Memorial Arts Center went up in Sugar Creek, were constructed

supposedly so that George Hickman Bannister would never be

forgotten. But nobody ever thought about him anymore by the time

Dwayne Hoover met Kilgore Trout. There wasn’t much to think

about him, actually, even at the time of his death, except that he

was young.

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And he didn’t have any relatives in town anymore. There weren’t any

Bannisters in the phone book, except for The Bannister, which was a

motion picture theater. Actually, there wouldn’t even be a Bannister

Theater in there after the new phonebooks came out. The Bannister

had been turned into a cut-rate furniture store.

George Hickman Bannister’s father and mother and sister, Lucy, moved

away from town before either the tombstone or the fieldhouse was

completed, and they couldn’t be located for the dedication ceremonies.

It was a very restless country, with people tearing around all the time.

Every so often, somebody would stop to put up a monument.

There were monuments all over the country. But it was certainly

unusual for somebody from the common people to have not one

but two monuments in his honor, as was the case with George

Hickman Bannister.

Technically, though, only the tombstone had been erected specifically

for him. The fieldhouse would have gone up anyway. The money was

appropriated for the fieldhouse two years before George Hickman

Bannister was cut down in his prime. It didn’t cost anything extra to

name it after him.

Calvary Cemetery, where George Hickman Bannister was at rest, was

named in honor of a hill in Jerusalem, thousands of miles away. Many

people believed that the son of the Creator of the Universe had been

killed on that hill thousands of years ago.

Dwayne Hoover didn’t know whether to believe that or not. Neither did

Patty Keene.

And they certainly weren’t worrying about it now. They had other fish

to fry. Dwayne was wondering how long his attack of echolalia was

likely to last, and Patty Keene had to find out if her brand-newness

and prettiness and outgoing personality were worth a lot to a sweet,

sort of sexy, middle-aged old Pontiac dealer like Dwayne.

“Anyway,” she said, “it certainly is an honor to have you visit us, and

those aren’t the right words, either, but I hope you know what I mean.”

“Mean,” said Dwayne.

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116

“Is the food all right?” she said.

“All right,” said Dwayne.

“It’s what everybody else gets,” she said. “We didn’t do anything

special for you.”

“You,” said Dwayne.

It didn’t matter much what Dwayne said. It hadn’t mattered much for

years. It didn’t matter much what most people in Midland City said out

loud, except when they were talking about money or structures or

travel or machinery—or other measurable things. Every person had a

clearly defined part to play—as a black person, a female high school

drop-out, a Pontiac dealer, a gynecologist, a gas-conversion burner

installer. If a person stopped living up to expectations, because of bad

chemicals or one thing or another, everybody went on imagining that

the person was living up to expectations anyway.

That was the main reason the people in Midland City were so slow to

detect insanity in their associates. Their imaginations insisted that

nobody changed much from day to day. Their imaginations were

flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.

When Dwayne left Patty Keene and his Burger Chef, when he got into

his demonstrator and drove away, Patty Keene was persuaded that

she could make him happy with her young body, with her bravery and

cheerfulness. She wanted to cry about the lines in his face, and the

fact that his wife had eaten Dr‚no, and that his dog had to fight all the

time because it couldn’t wag its tail, about the fact that his son was a

homosexual. She knew all those things about Dwayne. Everybody

knew those things about Dwayne.

She gazed at the tower of radio station WMCY, which Dwayne Hoover

owned. It was the tallest structure in Midland City. It was eight times

as tall as the tombstone of George Hickman Bannister. It had a red

light on top of it—to keep airplanes away.

She thought about all the new and used cars Dwayne owned.

Earth scientists had just discovered something fascinating about the

continent Patty Keene was standing on, incidentally. It was riding on a

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slab about forty miles thick, and the slab was drifting around on molten

glurp. And all the other continents had slabs of their own. When one

slab crashed into another one, mountains were made.

The mountains of West Virginia, for instance, were heaved up when a

huge chunk of Africa crashed into North America. And the coal in the

state was formed from forests which were buried by the crash.

Patty Keene hadn’t heard the big news yet. Neither had Dwayne.

Neither had Kilgore Trout. I only found out about it day before

yesterday. I was reading a magazine, and I also had the television on.

A group of scientists was on television, saying that the theory of

floating, crashing, grinding slabs was more than a theory. They could

prove it was true now, and that Japan and San Francisco, for

instance, were in hideous danger, because that was where some of

the most violent crashing and grinding was going on.

They said, too, that ice ages would continue to occur. Mile-thick

glaciers would, geologically speaking, continue to go down and up like

window blinds.

Dwayne Hoover, incidentally, had an unusually large penis, and didn’t

even know it. The few women he had had anything to do with weren’t

sufficiently experienced to know whether he was average or not. The

world average was five and seven-eighths inches long, and one and

one-half inches in diameter when engorged with blood. Dwayne’s was

seven inches long and two and one-eighth inches in diameter when

engorged with blood.

Dwayne’s son Bunny had a penis that was exactly average.

Kilgore Trout had a penis seven inches long, but only one and onequarter inches in diameter.

This was an inch:

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Harry LeSabre, Dwayne’s sales manager, had a penis five inches long

and two and one-eighth inches in diameter.

Cyprian Ukwende, the black physician from Nigeria, had a penis six

and seven-eighths inches long and one and three-quarters inches

in diameter.

Don Breedlove, the gas-conversion unit installer who raped Patty

Keene, had a penis five and seven-eighths inches long and one and

seven-eighths inches in diameter.

Patty Keene had thirty-four-inch hips, a twenty-six-inch waist, and a

thirty-four-inch bosom.

Dwayne’s late wife had thirty-six-inch hips, a twenty-eight-inch waist,

and a thirty-eight-inch bosom when he married her. She had thirtynine-inch hips, a thirty-one-inch waist, and a thirty-eight-inch bosom

when she ate Dr‚no.

His mistress and secretary, Francine Pefko, had thirty-seven-inch

hips, a thirty-inch waist, and a thirty-nine-inch bosom.

His stepmother at the time of her death had thirty-four-inch hips, a

twenty-four-inch waist, and a thirty-three-inch bosom.

So Dwayne went from the Burger Chef to the construction site of the

new high school. He was in no hurry to get back to his automobile

agency, particularly since he had developed echolalia. Francine was

perfectly capable of running the place herself, without any advice from

Dwayne. He had trained her well.

So he kicked a little dirt down into the cellar hole. He spat down into

it. He stepped into mud. It sucked off his right shoe. He dug the

shoe out with his hands, and he wiped it. Then he leaned against an

old apple tree while he put the shoe back on. This had all been

farmland when Dwayne was a boy. There had been an apple

orchard here.

Dwayne forgot all about Patty Keene, but she certainly hadn’t

forgotten him. She would get up enough nerve that night to call him on

the telephone, but Dwayne wouldn’t be home to answer. He would be

in a padded cell in the County Hospital by then.

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And Dwayne wandered over to admire a tremendous earth-moving

machine which had cleared the site and dug the cellar hole. The

machine was idle now, caked with mud. Dwayne asked a white

workman how many horsepower drove the machine. All the workmen

were white.

The workman said this: “I don’t know how many horsepower, but I

know what we call it.”

“What do you call it?” said Dwayne, relieved to find his echolalia

was subsiding.

“We call it The Hundred-Nigger Machine,” said the workman. This had

reference to a time when black men had done most of the heavy

digging in Midland City.

The largest human penis in the United States was fourteen inches

long and two and a half inches in diameter.

The largest human penis in the world was sixteen and seven-eighths

inches long and two and one-quarter inches in diameter.

The blue whale, a sea mammal, had a penis ninety-six inches long

and fourteen inches in diameter.

One time Dwayne Hoover got an advertisement through the mail for a

penis-extender, made out of rubber. He could slip it over the end of his

real penis, according to the ad, and thrill his wife or sweetheart with

extra inches. They also wanted to sell him a lifelike rubber vagina for

when he was lonesome.

Dwayne went back to work at about two in the afternoon, and he

avoided everybody—because of his echolalia. He went into his inner

office, and he ransacked his desk drawers for something to read or

think about. He came across the brochure which offered him the

penis-extender and the rubber vagina for lonesomeness. He had

received it two months before. He still hadn’t thrown it away.

The brochure also offered him motion pictures such as the ones Kilgore

Trout had seen in New York. There were still photographs taken from

the movies, and these caused the sex excitation center in Dwayne’s

brain to send nerve impulses down to an erection center in his spine.

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The erection center caused the dorsal vein in his penis to tighten up,

so blood could get in all right, but it couldn’t get out again. It also

relaxed the tiny arteries in his penis, so they filled up the spongy

tissue of which Dwayne’s penis was mainly composed, so that the

penis got hard and stiff—like a plugged-up garden hose.

So Dwayne called Francine Pefko on the telephone, even though she

was only eleven feet away. “Francine—?” he said.

“Yes?” she said.

Dwayne fought down his echolalia. “I am going to ask you to do

something I have never asked you to do before. Promise me you’ll

say yes.”

“I promise,” she said.

“I want you to walk out of here with me this very moment,” he said,

“and come with me to the Quality Motor Court at Shepherdstown.”

Francine Pefko was willing to go to the Quality Motor Court with

Dwayne. It was her duty to go, she thought—especially since Dwayne

seemed so depressed and jangled. But she couldn’t simply walk away

from her desk for the afternoon, since her desk was the nerve center

of Dwayne Hoover’s Exit Eleven Pontiac Village.

“You ought to have some crazy young teen-ager, who can rush off

whenever you want her to,” Francine told Dwayne.

“I don’t want a crazy teen-ager,” said Dwayne. “I want you.”

“Then you’re going to have to be patient,” said Francine. She went

back to the Service Department, to beg Gloria Browning, the white

cashier back there, to man her desk for a little while.

Gloria didn’t want to do it. She had had a hysterectomy only a month

before, at the age of twenty-five—after a botched abortion at the

Ramada Inn down in Green County, on Route 53, across from the

entrance to Pioneer Village State Park.

There was a mildly amazing coincidence here: the father of the

destroyed fetus was Don Breedlove, the white gas-conversion unit

installer who had raped Patty Keene in the parking lot of the Bannister

Memorial Fieldhouse.

This was a man with a wife and three kids.

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Francine had a sign on the wall over her desk, which had been given

to her as a joke at the automobile agency’s Christmas party at the new

Holiday Inn the year before.

It spelled out the truth of her situation. This was it:

Gloria said she didn’t want to man the nerve center. “I don’t want to

man anything,” she said.

But Gloria took over Francine’s desk anyway. “I don’t have nerve

enough to commit suicide,” she said, “so I might as well do anything

anybody says—in the service of mankind.”

Dwayne and Francine headed for Shepherdstown in separate cars, so

as not to call attention to their love affair. Dwayne was in a

demonstrator again. Francine was in her own red GTO. GTO stood for

Gran Turismo Omologato. She had a sticker on her bumper which

said this:

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It was certainly loyal of her to put that sticker on her car. She was

always doing loyal things like that, always rooting for her man, always

rooting for Dwayne.

And Dwayne tried to reciprocate in little ways. For instance, he had

been reading articles and books on sexual intercourse recently. There

was a sexual revolution going on in the country, and women were

demanding that men pay more attention to women’s pleasure during

sexual intercourse, and not just think of themselves. The key to their

pleasure, they said, and scientists backed them up, was the clitoris, a

tiny meat cylinder which was right above the hole in women where

men were supposed to stick their much larger cylinders.

Men were supposed to pay more attention to the clitoris, and Dwayne

had been paying a lot more attention to Francine’s, to the point where

she said he was paying too much attention to it. This did not surprise

him. The things he had read about the clitoris had said that this was a

danger—that a man could pay too much attention to it.

So, driving out to the Quality Motor Court that day, Dwayne was

hoping that he would pay exactly the right amount of attention to

Francine’s clitoris.

Kilgore Trout once wrote a short novel about the importance of the

clitoris in love-making. This was in response to a suggestion by his

second wife, Darlene, that he could make a fortune with a dirty

book. She told him that the hero should understand women so well

that he could seduce anyone he wanted. So Trout wrote The Son of

Jimmy Valentine.

Jimmy Valentine was a famous made-up person in another writer’s

books, just as Kilgore Trout was a famous made-up person in my

books. Jimmy Valentine in the other writer’s books sandpapered his

fingertips, so they were extrasensitive. He was a safe-cracker. His

sense of feel was so delicate that he could open any safe in the world

by feeling the tumblers fall.

Kilgore Trout invented a son for Jimmy Valentine, named Ralston

Valentine. Ralston Valentine also sandpapered his fingertips. But he

wasn’t a safe-cracker. Ralston was so good at touching women the

way they wanted to be touched, that tens of thousands of them

became his willing slaves. They abandoned their husbands or lovers

for him, in Trout’s story, and Ralston Valentine became President of

the United States, thanks to the votes of women.

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Dwayne and Francine made love in the Quality Motor Court. Then

they stayed in bed for a while. It was a water bed. Francine had a

beautiful body. So did Dwayne. “We never made love in the afternoon

before,” said Francine.

“I felt so tense,” said Wayne.

“I know,” said Francine. “Are you better now?”

“Yes.” He was lying on his back. His ankles were crossed. His hands

were folded behind his head. His great wang lay across his thigh like a

salami. It slumbered now.

“I love you so much,” said Francine. She corrected herself. “I know I

promised not to say that, but that’s a promise I can’t help breaking all

the time.” The thing was: Dwayne had made a pact with her that

neither one of them was ever to mention love. Since Dwayne’s wife

had eaten Dr‚no, Dwayne never wanted to hear about love ever again.

The subject was too painful.

Dwayne snuffled. It was customary for him to communicate by means

of snuffles after sexual intercourse. The snuffles all had meanings

which were bland: “That’s all right . . . forget it . . . who could blame

you?” And so on.

“On Judgment Day,” said Francine, “when they ask me what bad

things I did down here, I’m going to have to tell them, ‘Well—there was

a promise I made to a man I loved, and I broke it all the time. I

promised him never to say I loved him.’”

This generous, voluptuous woman, who had only ninety-six dollars

and eleven cents a week in take-home pay, had lost her husband,

Robert Pefko, in a war in Viet Nam. He was a career officer in the

Army. He had a penis six and one-half inches long and one and

seven-eighths inches in diameter.

He was a graduate of West Point, a military academy which turned

young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.

Francine followed Robert from West Point to Parachute School at Fort

Bragg, and then to South Korea, where Robert managed a Post

Exchange, which was a department store for soldiers, and then to the

University of Pennsylvania, where Robert took a Master’s Degree in

Anthropology, at Army expense, and then back to West Point, where

Robert was an Assistant Professor of Social Sciences for three years.

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After that, Francine followed Robert to Midland City, where Robert

oversaw the manufacture of a new sort of booby trap. A booby trap

was an easily hidden explosive device, which blew up when it was

accidentally twiddled in some way. One of the virtues of the new type

of booby trap was that it could not be smelled by dogs. Various armies

at that time were training dogs to sniff out booby traps.

When Robert and Francine were in Midland City, there weren’t any

other military people around, so they made their first civilian friends.

And Francine took a job with Dwayne Hoover, in order to augment her

husband’s salary and fill her days.

But then Robert was sent to Viet Nam.

Shortly after that, Dwayne’s wife ate Dr‚no and Robert was shipped

home in a plastic body bag.

“I pity men,” said Francine, there in the Quality Motor Court. She was

sincere. “I wouldn’t want to be a man—they take such chances, they

work so hard.” They were on the second floor of the motel. Their

sliding glass doors gave them a view of an iron railing and a concrete

terrace outside—and then Route 103, and then the wall and the

rooftops of the Adult Correctional Institution beyond that.

“I don’t wonder you’re tired and nervous,” Francine went on. “If I was a

man, I’d be tired and nervous, too. I guess God made women so men

could relax and be treated like little babies from time to time.” She was

more than satisfied with this arrangement.

Dwayne snuffled. The air was rich with the smell of raspberries,

which was the perfume in the disinfectant and roach-killer the

motel used.

Francine mused about the prison, where the guards were all white and

most of the prisoners were black. “Is it true,” she said, “that nobody

ever escaped from there?”

“It’s true,” said Dwayne.

“When was the last time they used the electric chair?” said Francine.

She was asking about a device in the basement of the prison, which

looked like this:

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The purpose of it was to kill people by jazzing them with more

electricity than their bodies could stand. Dwayne Hoover had seen it

twice—once during a tour of the prison by members of the Chamber of

Commerce years ago, and then again when it was actually used on a

black human being he knew.

Dwayne tried to remember when the last execution took place at

Shepherdstown. Executions had become unpopular. There were signs

that they might become popular again. Dwayne and Francine tried to

remember the most recent electrocution anywhere in the country

which had stuck in their minds.

They remembered the double execution of a man and wife for treason.

The couple had supposedly given secrets about how to make a

hydrogen bomb to another country.

They remembered the double execution of a man and woman who

were lovers. The man was good-looking and sexy, and he used to

seduce ugly old women who had money, and then he and the woman

he really loved would kill the women for their money. The woman he

really loved was young, but she certainly wasn’t pretty in the

conventional sense. She weighed two hundred and forty pounds.

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Francine wondered out loud why a thin, good-looking young man

would love a woman that heavy.

“It takes all kinds,” said Dwayne.

“You know what I keep thinking?” said Francine.

Dwayne snuffled.

“This would be a very good location for a Colonel Sanders Kentucky

Fried Chicken franchise.”

Dwayne’s relaxed body contracted as though each muscle in it had

been stung by a drop of lemon juice.

Here was the problem: Dwayne wanted Francine to love him for his

body and soul, not for what his money could buy. He thought Francine

was hinting that he should buy her a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried

Chicken franchise, which was a scheme for selling fried chicken.

A chicken was a flightless bird which looked like this:

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The idea was to kill it and pull out all its feathers, and cut off its head

and feet and scoop out its internal organs—and then chop it into

pieces and fry the pieces, and put the pieces in a waxed paper bucket

with a lid on it, so it looked like this:

Francine, who had been so proud of her capacity to make Dwayne

relax, was now ashamed to have made him tighten up again. He was

as rigid as an ironing board. “Oh my God—” she said, “what’s the

matter now?”

“If you’re going to ask me for presents,” said Dwayne, “just do me a

favor—and don’t hint around right after we’ve made love. Let’s keep

love-making and presents separate. O.K.?”

“I don’t even know what you think I asked for,” said Francine.

Dwayne mimicked her cruelly in a falsetto voice: “‘I don’t even know

what you think I asked you for,’ “ he said. He looked about as pleasant

and relaxed as a coiled rattlesnake now. It was his bad chemicals, of

course, which were compelling him to look like that. A real rattlesnake

looked like this:

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The Creator of the Universe had put a rattle on its tail. The Creator

had also given it front teeth which were hypodermic syringes filled with

deadly poison.

Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe.

Another animal invented by the Creator of the Universe was a

Mexican beetle which could make a blank-cartridge gun out of its rear

end. It could detonate its own farts and knock over other bugs with

shock waves.

Word of Honor—I read about it in an article on strange animals in

Diners’ Club Magazine.

So Francine got off the bed in order not to share it with the

seeming rattlesnake. She was aghast. All she could say over and

over again was, “You’re my man. You’re my man.” This meant that

she was willing to agree about anything with Dwayne, to do

anything for him, no matter how difficult or disgusting, to think up

nice things to do for him that he didn’t even notice, to die for him, if

necessary, and so on.

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She honestly tried to live that way. She couldn’t imagine anything

better to do. So she fell apart when Dwayne persisted in his

nastiness. He told her that every woman was a whore, and every

whore had her price, and Francine’s price was what a Colonel

Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise would cost, which would

be well over one hundred thousand dollars by the time adequate

parking and exterior lighting and all that was taken into

consideration, and so on.

Francine replied in blubbering gibberish that she had never

wanted the franchise for herself, that she had wanted it for Dwayne,

that everything she wanted was for Dwayne. Some of the words

came through. “I thought of all the people who come out here to

visit their relatives in prison, and I realized how most of them were

black, and I thought how much black people liked fried chicken,”

she said.

“So you want me to open a Nigger joint?” said Dwayne. And so on. So

Francine now had the distinction of being the second close associate

of Dwayne’s who discovered how vile he could be.

“Harry LeSabre was right,” said Francine. She was backed up against

the cement block wall of the motel room now, with her fingers spread

over her mouth. Harry LeSabre, of course, was Dwayne’s transvestite

sales manager. “He said you’d changed,” said Francine. She made a

cage of fingers around her mouth. “Oh, God, Dwayne—” she said,

“you’ve changed, you’ve changed.”

“Maybe it was time!” said Dwayne. “I never felt better in my life!” And

so on.

Harry LeSabre was at that moment crying, too. He was at home—in

bed. He had a purple velvet sheet over his head. He was well-to-do.

He had invested in the stock market very intelligently and luckily over

the years. He had bought one hundred shares of Xerox, for instance,

for eight dollars a share. With the passage of time, his shares had

become one hundred times as valuable, simply lying in the total

darkness and silence of a safe-deposit box.

There was a lot of money magic like that going on. It was almost as

though some blue fairy were flitting about that part of the dying

planet, waving her magic wand over certain deeds and bonds and

stock certificates.

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Harry’s wife, Grace, was stretched out on a chaise longue at some

distance from the bed. She was smoking a small cigar in a long holder

made from the legbone of a stork. A stork was a large European bird,

about half the size of a Bermuda Ern. Children who wanted to know

where babies came from were sometimes told that they were brought

by storks. People who told their children such a thing felt that their

children were too young to think intelligently about wide-open beavers

and all that.

And there were actually pictures of storks delivering babies on birth

announcements and in cartoons and so on, for children to see. A

typical one might look like this:

Dwayne Hoover and Harry LeSabre saw pictures like that when they

were very little boys. They believed them, too.

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Grace LeSabre expressed her contempt for the good opinion of

Dwayne Hoover, which her husband felt he had lost. “Fuck Dwayne

Hoover,” she said. “Fuck Midland City. Let’s sell the God damn Xerox

stock and buy a condominium on Maui.” Maui was one of the

Hawaiian Islands. It was widely believed to be a paradise.

“Listen,” said Grace, “we’re the only white people in Midland City with

any kind of sex life, as nearly as I can tell. You’re not a freak. Dwayne

Hoover’s the freak! How many orgasms do you think he has a month?”

“I don’t know,” said Harry from his humid tent.

Dwayne’s monthly orgasm rate on the average over the past ten

years, which included the last years of his marriage, was two and onequarter. Grace’s guess was close. “One point five,” she said. Her own

monthly average over the same period was eighty-seven. Her

husband’s average was thirty-six. He had been slowing up in recent

years, which was one of many reasons he had for feeling panicky.

Grace now spoke loudly and scornfully about Dwayne’s marriage. “He

was so scared of sex,” she said, “he married a woman who had never

heard of the subject, who was guaranteed to destroy herself, if she

ever did hear about it.” And so on. “Which she finally did,” she said.

“Can the reindeer hear you?” said Harry.

“Fuck the reindeer,” said Grace. Then she added, “No, the reindeer

cannot hear.” Reindeer was their code word for the black maid, who

was far away in the kitchen at the time. It was their code word for

black people in general. It allowed them to speak of the black problem

in the city, which was a big one, without giving offense to any black

person who might overhear.

“The reindeer’s asleep—or reading the Black Panther Digest,” she said.

The reindeer problem was essentially this: Nobody white had much

use for black people anymore—except for the gangsters who sold the

black people used cars and dope and furniture. Still, the reindeer went

on reproducing. There were these useless, big black animals

everywhere, and a lot of them had very bad dispositions. They were

given small amounts of money every month, so they wouldn’t have to

steal. There was talk of giving them very cheap dope, too—to keep

them listless and cheerful, and uninterested in reproduction.

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The Midland City Police Department, and the Midland County Sheriff’s

Department, were composed mainly of white men. They had racks

and racks of sub-machine guns and twelve-gauge automatic shotguns

for an open season on reindeer, which was bound to come.

“Listen—I’m serious,” said Grace to Harry. “This is the asshole of the

Universe. Let’s split to a condominium on Maui and live for a change.”

So they did.

Dwayne’s bad chemicals meanwhile changed his manner toward

Francine from nastiness to pitiful dependency. He apologized to her

for ever thinking that she wanted a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried

Chicken franchise. He gave her full credit for unflagging unselfishness.

He begged her to just hold him for a while, which she did.

“I’m so confused,” he said.

“We all are,” she said. She cradled his head against her breasts.

“I’ve got to talk to somebody,” said Dwayne.

“You can talk to Mommy, if you want,” said Francine. She meant that

she was Mommy.

“Tell me what life is all about,” Dwayne begged her fragrant bosom.

“Only God knows that,” said Francine.

Dwayne was silent for a while. And then he told her haltingly about a

trip he had made to the headquarters of the Pontiac Division of

General Motors at Pontiac, Michigan, only three months after his wife

ate Dr‚no.

“We were given a tour of all the research facilities,” he said. The thing

that impressed him most, he said, was a series of laboratories and

out-of-doors test areas where various parts of automobiles and even

entire automobiles were destroyed. Pontiac scientists set upholstery

on fire, threw gravel at windshields, snapped crankshafts and

driveshafts, staged head-on collisions, tore gearshift levers out by the

roots, ran engines at high speeds with almost no lubrication, opened

and closed glove compartment doors a hundred times a minute for

days, cooled dashboard clocks to within a few degrees of absolute

zero, and so on.

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“Everything you’re not supposed to do to a car, they did to a car,”

Dwayne said to Francine. “And I’ll never forget the sign on the front

door of the building where all that torture went on.” Here was the sign

Dwayne described to Francine:

“I saw that sign,” said Dwayne, “and I couldn’t help wondering if that

was what God put me on Earth for—to find out how much a man could

take without breaking.”

“I’ve lost my way,” said Dwayne. “I need somebody to take me by the

hand and lead me out of the woods.”

“You’re tired,” she said. “Why wouldn’t you be tired? You work so hard.

I feel sorry for men, they work so hard. You want to sleep for a while?”

“I can’t sleep,” said Dwayne, “until I get some answers.”

“You want to go to a doctor?” said Francine.

“I don’t want to hear the kinds of things doctors say,” said Dwayne. “I

want to talk to somebody brand new. Francine,” he said, and he dug

his fingers into her soft arm, “I want to hear new things from new

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people. I’ve heard everything anybody in Midland City ever said, ever

will say. It’s got to be somebody new.”

“Like who?” said Francine.

“I don’t know,” said Dwayne. “Somebody from Mars, maybe.”

“We could go to some other city,” said Francine.

“They’re all like here. They’re all the same,” said Dwayne.

Francine had an idea. “What about all these painters and writers and

composers coming to town?” she said. “You never talked to anybody

like that before. Maybe. you should talk to one of them. They don’t

think like other people.”

“I’ve tried everything else,” said Dwayne. He brightened. He nodded.

“You’re right! The Festival could give me a brand new viewpoint on

life!” he said.

“That’s what it’s for,” said Francine. “Use it!”

“I will,” said Dwayne. This was a bad mistake.

Kilgore Trout, hitchhiking westward, ever westward, had meanwhile

become a passenger in a Ford Galaxie. The man at the controls of the

Galaxie was a traveling salesman for a device which engulfed the rear

ends of trucks at loading docks. It was a telescoping tunnel of

rubberized canvas, and it looked like this in action:

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The idea of the gadget was to allow people in a building to load or

unload trucks without losing cold air in the summertime or hot air in

the wintertime to the out-of-doors.

The man in control of the Galaxie also sold large spools for wire and

cable and rope. He also sold fire extinguishers. He was a

manufacturer’s representative, he explained. He was his own boss, in

that he represented products whose manufacturers couldn’t afford

salesmen of their own.

“I make my own hours, and I pick the products I sell. The products

don’t sell me,” he said. His name was Andy Lieber. He was thirty-two.

He was white. He was a good deal overweight like so many people in

the country. He was obviously a happy man. He drove like a maniac.

The Galaxie was going ninety-two miles an hour now. “I’m one of the

few remaining free men in America,” he said.

He had a penis one inch in diameter and seven and a half inches

long. During the past year, he had averaged twenty-two orgasms

per month. This was far above the national average. His income

and the value of his life insurance policies at maturity were also far

above average.

Trout wrote a novel one time which he called How You Doin’? and it

was about national averages for this and that. An advertising agency

on another planet had a successful campaign for the local equivalent

of Earthling peanut butter. The eye-catching part of each ad was the

statement of some sort of average—the average number of children,

the average size of the male sex organ on that particular planet—

which was two inches long, with an inside diameter of three inches

and an outside diameter of four and a quarter inches—and so on. The

ads invited the readers to discover whether they were superior or

inferior to the majority, in this respect or that one—whatever the

respect was for that particular ad.

The ad went on to say that superior and inferior people alike ate such

and such brand of peanut butter. Except that it wasn’t really peanut

butter on that planet. It was Shazzbutter.

And so on.

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Chapter 16

And the peanut butter-eaters on earth were preparing to conquer the

shazzbutter-eaters on the planet in the book by Kilgore Trout. By this

time, the Earthlings hadn’t just demolished West Virginia and

Southeast Asia. They had demolished everything. So they were ready

to go pioneering again.

They studied the shazzbutter-eaters by means of electronic snooping,

and determined that they were too numerous and proud and

resourceful ever to allow themselves to be pioneered.

So the Earthlings infiltrated the ad agency which had the shazzbutter

account, and they buggered the statistics in the ads. They made the

average for everything so high that everybody on the planet felt

inferior to the majority in every respect.

And then the Earthling armored space ships came in and

discovered the planet. Only token resistance was offered here and

there, because the natives felt so below average. And then the

pioneering began.

Trout asked the happy manufacturer’s representative what it felt like to

drive a Galaxie, which was the name of the car. The driver didn’t hear

him, and Trout let it go. It was a dumb play on words, so that Trout

was asking simultaneously what it was like to drive the car and what it

was like to steer something like the Milky Way, which was one

hundred thousand light-years in diameter and ten thousand light-years

thick. It revolved once every two hundred million years. It contained

about one hundred billion stars.

And then Trout saw that a simple fire extinguisher in the Galaxie had

this brand name:

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As far as Trout knew, this word meant higher in a dead language. It

was also a thing a fictitious mountain climber in a famous poem kept

yelling as he disappeared into a blizzard up above. And it was also the

trade name for wood shavings which were used to protect fragile

objects inside packages.

“Why would anybody name a fire extinguisher Excelsior?” Trout asked

the driver.

The driver shrugged. “Somebody must have liked the sound of it,”

he said.

Trout looked out at the countryside, which was smeared by high

velocity. He saw this sign:

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So he was getting really close to Dwayne Hoover. And, as though the

Creator of the Universe or some other supernatural power were

preparing him for the meeting, Trout felt the urge to thumb through his

own book, Now It Can Be Told. This was the book which would soon

turn Dwayne into a homicidal maniac.

The premise of the book was this: Life was an experiment by the

Creator of the Universe, Who wanted to test a new sort of creature He

was thinking of introducing into the Universe. It was a creature with

the ability to make up its own mind. All the other creatures were fullyprogrammed robots.

The book was in the form of a long letter from The Creator of the

Universe to the experimental creature. The Creator congratulated the

creature and apologized for all the discomfort he had endured. The

Creator invited him to a banquet in his honor in the Empire Room of

the WaldorfAstoria Hotel in New York City, where a black robot named

Sammy Davis, Jr., would sing and dance.

And the experimental creature wasn’t killed after the banquet. He was

transferred to a virgin planet instead. Living cells were sliced from the

palms of his hands, while he was unconscious. The operation didn’t

hurt at all.

And then the cells were stirred into a soupy sea on the virgin planet.

They would evolve into ever more complicated life forms as the eons

went by. Whatever shapes they assumed, they would have free will.

Trout didn’t give the experimental creature a proper name. He simply

called him The Man.

On the virgin planet, The Man was Adam and the sea was Eve.

The Man often sauntered by the sea. Sometimes he waded in his Eve.

Sometimes he swam in her, but she was too soupy for an invigorating

swim. She made her Adam feel sleepy and sticky afterwards, so he

would dive into an icy stream that had just jumped off a mountain.

He screamed when he dived into the icy water, screamed again when

he came up for air. He bloodied his shins and laughed about it when

he scrambled up rocks to get out of the water.

He panted and laughed some more, and he thought of something

amazing to yell. The Creator never knew what he was going to yell,

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since The Creator had no control over him. The Man himself got to

decide what he was going to do next—and why. After a dip one day,

for instance, The Man yelled this: “Cheese!”

Another time he yelled, “Wouldn’t you really rather drive a Buick?”

The only other big animal on the virgin planet was an angel who

visited The Man occasionally. He was a messenger and an

investigator for the Creator of the Universe. He took the form of an

eight hundred pound male cinnamon bear. He was a robot, too, and

so was The Creator, according to Kilgore Trout.

The bear was attempting to get a line on why The Man did what he

did. He would ask, for instance, “Why did you yell, ‘Cheese’?”

And The Man would tell him mockingly, “Because I felt like it, you

stupid machine.”

Here is what The Man’s tombstone on the virgin planet looked like at

the end of the book by Kilgore Trout:

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Chapter 17

Bunny Hoover, Dwayne’s homosexual son, was dressing for work

now. He was the piano player in the cocktail lounge of the new

Holiday Inn. He was poor. He lived alone in a room without bath in the

old Fairchild Hotel, which used to be fashionable. It was a flophouse

now—in the most dangerous part of Midland City.

Very soon, Bunny Hoover would be seriously injured by Dwayne,

would soon share an ambulance with Kilgore Trout.

Bunny was pale, the same unhealthy color of the blind fish that used

to live in the bowels of Sacred Miracle Cave. Those fish were extinct.

They had all turned belly-up years ago, had been flushed from the

cave and into the Ohio River—to turn belly-up, to go bang in the

noonday sun.

Bunny avoided the sunshine, too. And the water from the taps of

Midland City was becoming more poisonous every day. He ate very

little. He prepared his own food in his room. The preparation was

simple, since vegetables and fruits were all he ate, and he munched

them raw.

He not only did without dead meat—he did without living meat, too,

without friends or lovers or pets. He had once been highly popular.

When he was at Prairie Military Academy, for instance, the student

body was unanimous in electing him Cadet Colonel, the highest rank

possible, in his senior year.

When Bunny played the piano bar at the Holiday Inn, he had many,

many secrets. One of them was this: he wasn’t really there. He was

able to absent himself from the cocktail lounge, and from the planet

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itself, for that matter, by means of Transcendental Meditation. He

learned this technique from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who once

stopped off in Midland City during a world-wide lecture tour.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in exchange for a new handkerchief, a piece

of fruit, a bunch of flowers, and thirty-five dollars, taught Bunny to

close his eyes, and to say this euphonious nonsense word to himself

over and over again: “Aye-eeeeem, aye-eeeeem, aye-eeeeem.”

Bunny sat on the edge of his bed in the hotel room now, and he did it.

“Aye-eeeeem, aye-eeeeem,” he said to himself-internally. The rhythm

of the chant matched one syllable with each two beats in his heart. He

closed his eyes. He became a skin diver in the depths of his mind.

The depths were seldom used.

His heart slowed. His respiration nearly stopped. A single word floated

by in the depths. It had somehow escaped from the busier parts of his

mind. It wasn’t connected to anything. It floated by lazily, a

translucent, scarf-like fish. The word was untroubling. Here was the

word: “Blue.” Here is what it looked like to Bunny Hoover:

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And then another lovely scarf swam by. It looked like this:

Fifteen minutes later, Bunny’s awareness bobbed to the surface of its

own accord. Bunny was refreshed. He got up from the bed, and he

brushed his hair with the military brushes his mother had given him

when he was elected Cadet Colonel so long ago.

Bunny was sent away to military school, an institution devoted to

homicide and absolutely humorless obedience, when he was only ten

years old. Here is why: He told Dwayne that he wished he were a

woman instead of a man, because what men did was so often cruel

and ugly.

Listen: Bunny Hoover went to Prairie Military Academy for eight years

of uninterrupted sports, buggery and Fascism. Buggery consisted of

sticking one’s penis in somebody else’s asshole or mouth, or having it

done to one by somebody else. Fascism was a fairly popular political

philosophy which made sacred whatever nation and race the

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philosopher happened to belong to. It called for an autocratic,

centralized government, headed up by a dictator. The dictator had to

be obeyed, no matter what he told somebody to do.

And Bunny would bring new medals with him every time he came

home for vacation. He could fence and box and wrestle and swim, he

could shoot a rifle and a pistol, fight with bayonets, ride a horse,

creep and crawl through shrubbery, peek around corners without

being seen.

He would show off his medals, and his mother would tell him when his

father was out of hearing that she was becoming unhappier with each

passing day. She would hint that Dwayne was a monster. It wasn’t

true. It was all in her head.

She would begin to tell Bunny what was so vile about Dwayne, but

she always stopped short. “You’re too young to hear about such

things,” she’d say, even when Bunny was sixteen years old. “There’s

nothing you or anybody could do about them anyway.” She would

pretend to lock her lips with a key, and then whisper to Bunny, “There

are secrets I will carry to my grave.”

Her biggest secret, of course, was one that Bunny didn’t detect until she

knocked herself off with Dr‚no. Celia Hoover was crazy as a bedbug.

My mother was, too.

Listen: Bunny’s mother and my mother were different sorts of human

beings, but they were both beautiful in exotic ways, and they both

boiled over with chaotic talk about love and peace and wars and evil

and desperation, of better days coming by and by, of worse days

coming by and by. And both our mothers committed suicide. Bunny’s

mother ate Dr‚no. My mother ate sleeping pills, which wasn’t nearly

as horrible.

And Bunny’s mother and my mother had one really bizarre symptom

in common: neither one could stand to have her picture taken. They

were usually fine in the daytime. They usually concealed their frenzies

until late at night. But, if somebody aimed a camera at either one of

them during the daytime, the mother who was aimed at would crash

down on her knees and protect her head with her arms, as though

somebody was about to club her to death. It was a scary and pitiful

thing to see.

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At least Bunny’s mother taught him how to control a piano, which was

a music machine. At least Bunny Hoover’s mother taught him a trade.

A good piano controller could get a job making music in cocktail

lounges almost anywhere in the world, and Bunny was a good one.

His military training was useless, despite all the medals he won. The

armed forces knew he was a homosexual, that he was certain to fall in

love with other fighting men, and the armed forces didn’t want to put

up with such love affairs.

So Bunny Hoover now got ready to practice his trade. He slipped a

black velvet dinner jacket over a black turtleneck sweater now. Bunny

looked out his only window at the alleyway. The better rooms afforded

views of Fairchild Park, where there had been fifty-six murders in the

past two years. Bunny’s room was on the second floor, so his window

framed a piece of the blank brick side of what used to be the Keedsler

Opera House.

There was an historical marker on the front of the former opera house.

Not many people could understand it, but this is what it said:

The Opera House used to be the home of the Midland City Symphony

Orchestra, which was an amateur group of music enthusiasts. But they

became homeless in 1927, when the Opera House became a motion

picture house, The Bannister. The orchestra remained homeless, too,

until the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts went up.

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And The Bannister was the city’s leading movie house for many years,

until it was engulfed by the high crime district, which was moving north

all the time. So it wasn’t a theater anymore, even though there were

still busts of Shakespeare and Mozart and so on gazing down from

niches in the walls inside.

The stage was still in there, too, but it was crowded with dinette sets

now. The Empire Furniture Company had taken over the premises

now. It was gangster-controlled.

The nickname for Bunny’s neighborhood was Skid Row. Every

American town of any size had a neighborhood with the same

nickname: Skid Row. It was a place where people who didn’t have any

friends or relatives or property or usefulness or ambition were

supposed to go.

People like that would be treated with disgust in other neighborhoods,

and policemen would keep them moving. They were as easy to move,

usually, as toy balloons.

And they would drift hither and yon, like balloons filled with some gas

slightly heavier than air, until they came to rest in Skid Row, against

the foundations of the old Fairchild Hotel.

They could snooze and mumble to each other all day long. They

could beg. They could get drunk. The basic scheme was this one:

they were to stay there and not bother anybody anywhere else—until

they were murdered for thrills, or until they were frozen to death by

the wintertime.

Kilgore Trout wrote a story one time about a town which decided to tell

derelicts where they were and what was about to happen to them by

putting up actual street signs like this:

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Bunny now smiled at himself in the mirror, in the leak.

He called himself to attention for a moment, became again the

insufferably brainless, humorless, heartless soldier he had learned to

be in military school. He murmured the motto of the school, a motto he

used to have to shout about a hundred times a day—at dawn, at

meals, at the start of every class, at games, at bayonet practice, at

sunset, at bedtime:

“Can do,” he said. “Can do.”

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Chapter 18

The Galaxie in which Kilgore Trout was a passenger was on the

Interstate now, close to Midland City. It was creeping. It was

trapped in rush hour traffic from Barrytron and Western Electric and

Prairie Mutual. Trout looked up from his reading, saw a billboard

which said this:

So Sacred Miracle Cave had become a part of the past.

As an old, old man, Trout would be asked by Dr. Thor Lembrig, the

Secretary-General of the United Nations, if he feared the future. He

would give this reply:

“Mr. Secretary-General, it is the past which scares the bejesus out of me.”

Dwayne Hoover was only four miles away. He was sitting alone on a

zebra-skin banquette in the cocktail lounge of the new Holiday Inn. It

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was dark in there, and quiet, too. The glare and uproar of rush hour

traffic on the Interstate was blocked out by thick drapes of crimson

velvet. On each table was a hurricane lamp with a candle inside,

although the air was still.

On each table was a bowl of dry-roasted peanuts, too, and a sign

which allowed the staff to refuse service to anyone who was

inharmonious with the mood of the lounge. Here is what it said:

Bunny Hoover was controlling the piano. He had not looked up when

his father came in. Neither had his father glanced in his direction.

They had not exchanged greetings for many years.

Bunny went on playing his white man’s blues. They were slow and

tinkling, with capricious silences here and there. Bunny’s blues had

some of the qualities of a music box, a tired music box. They

tinkled, stopped, then reluctantly, torpidly, they managed a few

tinkles more.

Bunny’s mother used to collect tinkling music boxes, among other things.

Listen: Francine Pefko was at Dwayne’s automobile agency next door.

She was catching up on all the work she should have done that

afternoon. Dwayne would beat her up very soon.

And the only other person on the property with her as she typed and

filed was Wayne Hoobler, the black parolee, who still lurked among

the used cars. Dwayne would try to beat him up, too, but Wayne was

a genius at dodging blows.

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Francine was pure machinery at the moment, a machine made of

meat—a typing machine, a filing machine.

Wayne Hoobler, on the other hand, had nothing machine-like to do. He

ached to be a useful machine. The used cars were all locked up tight

for the night. Now and then aluminum propellors on a wire overhead

would be turned by a lazy breeze, and Wayne would respond to them

as best he could. “Go,” he would say to them. “Spin ‘roun’.”

He established a sort of relationship with the traffic on the Interstate,

too, appreciating its changing moods. “Everybody goin’ home,” he said

during the rush hour jam. “Everybody home now,” he said later on,

when the traffic thinned out. Now the sun was going down.

“Sun goin’ down,” said Wayne Hoobler. He had no clues as to where

to go next. He supposed without minding much that he might die of

exposure that night. He had never seen death by exposure, had never

been threatened by it, since he had so seldom been out-of-doors. He

knew of death by exposure because the papery voice of the little radio

in his cell told of people’s dying of exposure from time to time.

He missed that papery voice. He missed the clash of steel doors. He

missed the bread and the stew and the pitchers of milk and coffee. He

missed fucking other men in the mouth and the asshole, and being

facked in the mouth and the asshole, and jerking off—and fucking

cows in the prison dairy, all events in a normal sex life on the planet,

as far as he knew.

Here would be a good tombstone for Wayne Hoobler when he died:

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The dairy at the prison provided milk and cream and butter and

cheese and ice cream not only for the prison and the County Hospital.

It sold its products to the outside world, too. Its trademark didn’t

mention prison. This was it:

Wayne couldn’t read very well. The words Hawaii and Hawaiian, for

instance, appeared in combination with more familiar words and

symbols in signs painted on the windows of the showroom and on the

windshields of some used cars. Wayne tried to decode the mysterious

words phonetically, without any satisfaction. “Wahee-io,” he would

say, and “Hoo-he-woo-hi,” and so on.

Wayne Hoobler smiled now, not because he was happy but because,

with so little to do, he thought he might as well show off his teeth.

They were excellent teeth. The Adult Correctional Institution at

Shepherdstown was proud of its dentistry program.

It was such a famous dental program, in fact, that it had been written

up in medical journals and in the Reader’s Digest, which was the

dying planet’s most popular magazine. The theory behind the program

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was that many ex-convicts could not or would not get jobs because of

their appearances, and good looks began with good teeth.

The program was so famous, in fact, that police even in neighboring

states, when they picked up a poor man with expensively maintained

teeth, fillings and bridgework and all that, were likely to ask him, “All

right, boy—how many years you spend in Shepherdstown?”

Wayne Hoobler heard some of the orders which a waitress called to

the bartender in the cocktail lounge. Wayne heard her call, “Gilbey’s

and quinine, with a twist.” He had no idea what that was—or a

Manhattan or a brandy Alexander or a sloe gin fizz. “Give me a

Johnnie Walker Rob Roy,” she called, “and a Southern Comfort on the

rocks, and a Bloody Mary with Wolfsichmidt’s.”

Wayne’s only experiences with alcohol had had to do with drinking

cleaning fluids and eating shoe polish and so on. He had no fondness

for alcohol.

“Give me a Black and White and water,” he heard the waitress say,

and Wayne should have pricked up his ears at that. That particular

drink wasn’t for any ordinary person. That drink was for the person

who had created all Wayne’s misery to date, who could kill him or

make him a millionaire or send him back to prison or do whatever he

damn pleased with Wayne. That drink was for me.

I had come to the Arts Festival incognito. I was there to watch a

confrontation between two human beings I had created: Dwayne

Hoover and Kilgore Trout. I was not eager to be recognized. The

waitress lit the hurricane lamp on my table. I pinched out the flame

with my fingers. I had bought a pair of sunglasses at a Holiday Inn

outside of Ashtabula, Ohio, where I spent the night before. I wore

them in the darkness now. They looked like this:

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The lenses were silvered, were mirrors to anyone looking my way.

Anyone wanting to know what my eyes were like was confronted with

his or her own twin reflections. Where other people in the cocktail

lounge had eyes, I had two holes into another universe. I had leaks.

There was a book of matches on my table, next to my Pall Mall

cigarettes.

Here is the message on the book of matches, which I read an hour

and a half later, while Dwayne was beating the daylights out of

Francine Pefko:

“It’s easy to make $100 a week in your spare time by showing

comfortable, latest style Mason shoes to your friends. EVERYBODY

goes for Mason shoes with their many special comfort features! We’ll

send FREE moneymaking kit so you can run your business from

home. We’ll even tell you how you can earn shoes FREE OF COST

as a bonus for taking profitable orders!”

And so on.

“This is a very bad book you’re writing,” I said to myself behind my leaks.

“I know,” I said.

“You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did,” I said.

“I know,” I said.

There in the cocktail lounge, peering out through my leaks at a world

of my own invention, I mouthed this word: schizophrenia.

The sound and appearance of the word had fascinated me for many

years. It sounded and looked to me like a human being sneezing in a

blizzard of soapflakes.

I did not and do not know for certain that I have that disease. This

much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable

by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately

important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed.

I am better now.

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Word of honor: I am better now.

I was really sick for a while, though. I sat there in a cocktail lounge of

my own invention, and I stared through my leaks at a white cocktail

waitress of my own invention. I named her Bonnie MacMahon. I had

her bring Dwayne Hoover his customary drink, which was a House of

Lords martini with a twist of lemon peel. She was a longtime

acquaintance of Dwayne’s. Her husband was a guard in the Sexual

Offenders’ Wing of the Adult Correctional Institution. Bonnie had to

work as a waitress because her husband lost all their money by

investing it in a car wash in Shepherdstown.

Dwayne had advised them not to do it. Here is how Dwayne knew her

and her husband Ralph: They had bought nine Pontiacs from him over

the past sixteen years.

“We’re a Pontiac family,” they’d say.

Bonnie made a joke now as she served him his martini. She made the

same joke every time she served anybody a martini. “Breakfast of

Champions,” she said.

The expression “Breakfast of Champions” is a registered trademark

of General Mills, Inc., for use on a breakfast cereal product. The use

of the identical expression as the title for this book as well as

throughout the book is not intended to indicate an association with or

sponsorship by General Mills, nor is it intended to disparage their

fine products.

Dwayne was hoping that some of the distinguished visitors to the Arts

Festival, who were all staying at the Inn, would come into the cocktail

lounge. He wanted to talk to them, if he could, to discover whether

they had truths about life which he had never heard before. Here is

what he hoped new truths might do for him: enable him to laugh at his

troubles, to go on living, and to keep out of the North Wing of the

Midland County General Hospital, which was for lunatics.

While he waited for an artist to appear, he consoled himself with the

only artistic creation of any depth and mystery which was stored in his

head. It was a poem he had been forced to learn by heart during his

sophomore year in Sugar Creek High School, the elite white high

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school at the time. Sugar Creek High was a Nigger high school now.

Here was the poem:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line

Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

Some poem!

And Dwayne was so open to new suggestions about the meaning of

life that he was easily hypnotized. So, when he looked down into his

martini, he was put into a trance by dancing myriads of winking eyes

on the surface of his drink. The eyes were beads of lemon oil.

Dwayne missed it when two distinguished visitors to the Arts Festival

came in and sat down on barstools next to Bunny’s piano. They were

white. They were Beatrice Keedsler, the Gothic novelist, and Rabo

Karabekian, the minimal painter.

Bunny’s piano, a Steinway baby grand, was armored with pumpkincolored Formica and ringed with stools. People could eat and drink

from the piano. On the previous Thanksgiving, a family of eleven had

had Thanksgiving dinner served on the piano. Bunny played.

“This has to be the asshole of the Universe,” said Rabo Karabekian,

the minimal painter.

Beatrice Keedsler, the Gothic novelist, had grown up in Midland

City. “I was petrified about coming home after all these years,” she

said to Karabekian.

“Americans are always afraid of coming home,” said Karabekian, “with

good reason, may I say.”

“They used to have good reason,” said Beatrice, “but not anymore.

The past has been rendered harmless. I would tell any wandering

American now, ‘Of course you can go home again, and as often as

you please. It’s just a motel.’”

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Traffic on the westbound barrel of the Interstate had come to a halt a

mile east of the new Holiday Inn—because of a fatal accident on Exit

10A. Drivers and passengers got out of their cars—to stretch their legs

and find out, if they could, what the trouble was up ahead.

Kilgore Trout was among those who got out. He learned from others

that the new Holiday Inn was within easy walking distance. So he

gathered up his parcels from the front seat of the Galaxie. He thanked

the driver, whose name he had forgotten, and he began to trudge.

He also began to assemble in his mind a system of beliefs which

would be appropriate to his narrow mission in Midland City, which was

to show provincials, who were bent on exalting creativity, a would-be

creator who had failed and failed. He paused in his trudge to examine

himself in the rearview mirror, the rearview leak, of a truck locked up

in traffic. The tractor was pulling two trailers instead of one. Here was

the message the owners of the rig saw fit to shriek at human beings

wherever it went:

Trout’s image in the leak was as shocking as he had hoped it would

be. He had not washed up after his drubbing by The Pluto Gang, so

there was caked blood on one earlobe, and more under his left

nostril. There was dog shit on a shoulder of his coat. He had

collapsed into dog shit on the handball court under the Queensboro

Bridge after the robbery.

By an unbelievable coincidence, that shit came from the wretched

greyhound belonging to a girl I knew.

The girl with the greyhound was an assistant lighting director for a

musical comedy about American history, and she kept her poor

greyhound, who was named Lancer, in a one-room apartment

fourteen feet wide and twenty-six feet long, and six flights of stairs

above street level. His entire life was devoted to unloading his

excrement at the proper time and place. There were two proper places

to put it: in the gutter outside the door seventy-two steps below, with

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the traffic whizzing by, or in a roasting pan his mistress kept in front of

the Westinghouse refrigerator.

Lancer had a very small brain, but he must have suspected from time

to time, just as Wayne Hoobler did, that some kind of terrible mistake

had been made.

Trout trudged onward, a stranger in a strange land. His pilgrimage

was rewarded with new wisdom, which would never have been his

had he remained in his basement in Cohoes. He learned the answer

to a question many human beings were asking themselves so

frantically: “What’s blocking traffic on the westbound barrel of the

Midland City stretch of the Interstate?”

The scales fell from the eyes of Kilgore Trout. He saw the explanation:

a Queen of the Prairies milk truck was lying on its side, blocking the

flow. It had been hit hard by a ferocious 1971 Chevrolet Caprice twodoor. The Chevy had jumped the median divider strip. The Chevy’s

passenger hadn’t used his seat belt. He had shot right through the

shatterproof windshield. He was lying dead now in the concrete trough

containing Sugar Creek. The Chevy’s driver was also dead. He had

been skewered by the post of his steering wheel.

The Chevy’s passenger was bleeding blood as he lay dead in Sugar

Creek. The milk truck was bleeding milk. Milk and blood were about to

be added to the composition of the stinking ping-pong balls which

were being manufactured in the bowels of Sacred Miracle Cave.

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Chapter 19

I was on a par with the Creator of the Universe there in the dark in the

cocktail lounge. I shrunk the Universe to a ball exactly one light-year in

diameter. I had it explode. I had it disperse itself again.

Ask me a question, any question. How old is the Universe? It is one

half-second old, but that half-second has lasted one quintillion years

so far. Who created it? Nobody created it. It has always been here.

What is time? It is a serpent which eats its tail, like this:

This is the snake which uncoiled itself long enough to offer Eve the

apple, which looked like this:

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What was the apple which Eve and Adam ate? It was the Creator of

the Universe.

And so on.

Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.

Listen:

The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my

hurricane lamp again. I wouldn’t let her. “Can you see anything in the

dark, with your sunglasses on?” she asked me.

“The big show is inside my head,” I said.

“Oh,” she said.

“I can tell fortunes,” I said. “You want your fortune told?”

“Not right now,” she said. She went back to the bar, and she and the

bartender had some sort of conversation about me, I think. The

bartender took several anxious looks in my direction. All he could see

were the leaks over my eyes. I did not worry about his asking me to

leave the establishment. I had created him, after all. I gave him a

name: Harold Newcomb Wilbur. I awarded him the Silver Star, the

Bronze Star, the Soldier’s Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, and a

Purple Heart with two Oak-Leaf Clusters, which made him the second

most decorated veteran in Midland City. I put all his medals under his

handkerchiefs in a dresser drawer.

He won all those medals in the Second World War, which was staged

by robots so that Dwayne Hoover could give a free-willed reaction to

such a holocaust. The war was such an extravaganza that there was

scarcely a robot anywhere who didn’t have a part to play. Harold

Newcomb Wilbur got his medals for killing Japanese, who were yellow

robots. They were fueled by rice.

And he went on staring at me, even though I wanted to stop him now.

Here was the thing about my control over the characters I created: I

could only guide their movements approximately, since they were

such big animals. There was inertia to overcome. It wasn’t as though I

was connected to them by steel wires. It was more as though I was

connected to them by stale rubberbands.

So I made the green telephone in back of the bar ring. Harold Newcomb

Wilbur answered it, but he kept his eyes on me. I had to think fast about

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who was on the other end of the telephone. I put the first most

decorated veteran in Midland City on the other end. He had a penis

eight hundred miles long and two hundred and ten miles in diameter,

but practically all of it was in the fourth dimension. He got his medals in

the war in Viet Nam. He had also fought yellow robots who ran on rice.

“Cocktail lounge,” said Harold Newcomb Wilbur.

“Hal—?”

“Yes?”

“This is Ned Lingamon.”

“I’m busy.”

“Don’t hang up. The cops got me down at City Jail. They only let me

have one call, so I called you.”

“Why me?”

“You’re the only friend I got left.”

“What they got you in for?”

“They say I killed my baby.”

And so on.

This man, who was white, had all the medals Harold Newcomb Wilbur

had, plus the highest decoration for heroism which an American

soldier could receive, which looked like this:

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He had now also committed the lowest crime which an American

could commit, which was to kill his own child. Her name was Cynthia

Anne, and she certainly didn’t live very long before she was made

dead again. She got killed for crying and crying. She wouldn’t shut up.

First she drove her seventeen-year-old mother away with all her

demands, and then her father killed her.

And so on.

As for the fortune I might have told for the waitress, this was it: “You

will be swindled by termite exterminators and not even know it. You

will buy steel-belted radial tires for the front wheels of your car. Your

cat will be killed by a motorcyclist named Headley Thomas, and you

will get another cat. Arthur, your brother in Atlanta, will find eleven

dollars in a taxicab.”

I might have told Bunny Hoover’s fortune, too: “Your father will

become extremely ill, and you will respond so grotesquely that there

will be talk of putting you in the booby hatch, too. You will stage

scenes in the hospital waiting room, telling doctors and nurses that

you are to blame for your father’s disease. You will blame yourself for

trying for so many years to kill him with hatred. You will redirect your

hatred. You will hate your mom.”

And so on.

And I had Wayne Hoobler, the black ex-convict, stand bleakly among

the garbage cans outside the back door of the Inn, and examine the

currency which had been given to him at the prison gate that morning.

He had nothing else to do.

He studied the pyramid with the blazing eye on top. He wished he had

more information about the pyramid and the eye. There was so much

to learn!

Wayne didn’t even know the Earth revolved around the Sun. He thought

the Sun revolved around the Earth, because it certainly looked that way.

A truck sizzled by on the Interstate, seemed to cry out in pain to

Wayne, because he read the message on the side of it phonetically.

The message told Wayne that the truck was in agony, as it hauled

things from here to there. This was the message, and Wayne said it

out loud:

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Here was what was going to happen to Wayne in about four days—

because I wanted it to happen to him: He would be picked up and

questioned by policemen, because he was behaving suspiciously

outside the back gate of Barrytron, Ltd., which was involved in supersecret weapons work. They thought at first that he might be

pretending to be stupid and ignorant, that he might, in fact, be a

cunning spy for the Communists.

A check of his fingerprints and his wonderful dental work proved that

he was who he said he was. But there was still something else he had

to explain: What was he doing with a membership card in the Playboy

Club of America, made out in the name of Paulo di Capistrano? He

had found it in a garbage can in back of the new Holiday Inn.

And so on.

And it was time now for me to have Rabo Karabekian, the minimalist

painter, and Beatrice Keedsler, the novelist, say and do some more

stuff for the sake of this book. I did not want to spook them by staring

at them as I worked their controls, so I pretended to be absorbed in

drawing pictures on my tabletop with a damp fingertip.

I drew the Earthling symbol for nothingness, which was this:

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I drew the Earthling symbol for everything, which was this:

Dwayne Hoover and Wayne Hoobler knew the first one, but not the

second one. And now I drew a symbol in vanishing mist which was

bitterly familiar to Dwayne but not to Wayne. This was it:

And now I drew a symbol whose meaning Dwayne had known for a

few years in school, a meaning which had since eluded him. The

symbol would have looked like the end of a table in a prison dining hall

to Wayne. It represented the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its

diameter. This ratio could also be expressed as a number, and even

as Dwayne and Wayne and Karabekian and Beatrice Keedsler and all

the rest of us went about our business, Earthling scientists were

monotonously radioing that number into outer space. The idea was to

show other inhabited planets, in case they were listening, how

intelligent we were. We had tortured circles until they coughed up this

symbol of their secret lives:

And I made an invisible duplicate on my Formica tabletop of a

painting by Rabo Karabekian, entitled The Temptation of Saint

Anthony. My duplicate was a miniature of the real thing, and mine

was not in color, but I had captured the picture’s form and the spirit,

too. This is what I drew.

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The original was twenty feet wide and sixteen feet high. The field was

Hawaiian Avocado, a green wall paint manufactured by the O’Hare

Paint and Varnish Company in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. The vertical

stripe was dayglo orange reflecting tape. This was the most

expensive piece of art, not counting buildings and tombstones, and

not counting the statue of Abraham Lincoln in front of the old Nigger

high school.

It was a scandal what the painting cost. It was the first purchase for

the permanent collection of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the

Arts. Fred T. Barry, the Chairman of the Board of Barrytron, Ltd., had

coughed up fifty thousand dollars of his own for the picture.

Midland City was outraged. So was I.

So was Beatrice Keedsler, but she kept her dismay to herself as she

sat at the piano bar with Karabekian. Karabekian, who wore a

sweatshirt imprinted with the likeness of Beethoven, knew he was

surrounded by people who hated him for getting so much money for

so little work. He was amused.

Like everybody else in the cocktail lounge, he was softening his brain

with alcohol. This was a substance produced by a tiny creature called

yeast. Yeast organisms ate sugar and excreted alcohol. They killed

themselves by destroying their own environment with yeast shit.

Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between

two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of

life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because

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of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that

they were making champagne.

So I had Beatrice Keedsler say to Rabo Karabekian there at the piano

bar, “This is a dreadful confession, but I don’t even know who Saint

Anthony was. Who was he, and why should anybody have wanted to

tempt him?”

“I don’t know, and I would hate to find out,” said Karabekian.

“You have no use for truth?” said Beatrice.

“You know what truth is?” said Karabekian. “It’s some crazy thing my

neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what

he believes. He tells me, and I say, ‘Yeah, yeah—ain’t it the truth?’”

I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the

painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian with his meaningless

pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor

people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with

other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had

leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant

details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a

beginning, a middle, and an end.

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more

enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen.

And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how

innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and

with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like

people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot

each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending

short stories and books.

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though

their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that

was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their madeup tales.

And so on.

Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous,

unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved

to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be

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exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal

weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I

would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.

If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary

trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us,

that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of

that: It can be done.

Adapting to chaos there in the cocktail lounge, I now had Bonnie

MacMahon, who was exactly as important as anybody else in the

Universe, bring more yeast excrement to Beatrice Keedsler and

Karabekian. Karabekian’s drink was a Beefeater’s dry martini with a

twist of lemon peel, so Bonnie said to him, “Breakfast of Champions.”

“That’s what you said when you brought me my first martini,” said

Karabekian.

“I say it every time I give anybody a martini,” said Bonnie.

“Doesn’t that get tiresome?” said Karabekian. “Or maybe that’s why

people found cities in Godforsaken places like this—so they can make

the same jokes over and over again, until the Bright Angel of Death

stops their mouths with ashes.”

“I just try to cheer people up,” said Bonnie. “If that’s a crime, I never

heard about it till now. I’ll stop saying it from now on. I beg your

pardon. I did not mean to give offense.”

Bonnie detested Karabekian, but she was as sweet as pie to him. She

had a policy of never showing her anger about anything there in the

cocktail lounge. The largest part of her income by far came from tips, and

the way to get big tips was to smile, smile, smile, no matter what. Bonnie

had only two goals in life now. She meant to recoup all the money her

husband had lost in the car wash in Shepherdstown, and she ached to

have steel-belted radial tires for the front wheels of her automobile.

Her husband, meanwhile, was at home watching professional golfers

on television, and getting smashed on yeast excrement.

Saint Anthony, incidentally, was an Egyptian who founded the very

first monastery, which was a place where men could live simple lives

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and pray often to the Creator of the Universe, without the distractions

of ambition and sex and yeast excrement. Saint Anthony himself sold

everything he had when he was young, and he went out into the

wilderness and lived alone for twenty years.

He was often tempted during all those years of perfect solitude by

visions of good times he might have had with food and men and

women and children and the marketplace and so on.

His biographer was another Egyptian, Saint Athanasius, whose

theories on the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the divinity of the Holy

Spirit, set down three hundred years after the murder of Christ, were

considered valid by Catholics even in Dwayne Hoover’s time.

The Catholic high school in Midland City, in fact, was named in honor

of Saint Athanasius. It was named in honor of Saint Christopher at

first, but then the Pope, who was head of Catholic churches

everywhere, announced that there probably never had been a Saint

Christopher, so people shouldn’t honor him anymore.

A black male dishwasher stepped out of the kitchen of the Inn now for

a Pall Mall cigarette and some fresh air. He wore a large button on his

sweat-soaked white T-shirt which said this:

There were bowls of such buttons around the Inn, for anybody to

help himself to, and the dishwasher had taken one in a spirit of

levity. He had no use for works of art, except for cheap and simple

ones which weren’t meant to live very long. His name was Eldon

Robbins, and he had a penis nine inches long and two inches

in diameter.

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Eldon Robbins, too, had spent time in the Adult Correctional

Institution, so it was easy for him to recognize Wayne Hoobler, out

among the garbage cans, as a new parolee. “Welcome to the real

world, Brother,” he said gently and with wry lovingness to Wayne.

“When was the last time you ate? This mornin’?”

Wayne shyly acknowledged that this was true. So Eldon took him

through a kitchen to a long table where the kitchen staff ate. There

was a television set back there, and it was on, and it showed Wayne

the beheading of Queen Mary of Scotland. Everybody was all dressed

up, and Queen Mary put her head on the block of her own accord.

Eldon arranged for Wayne to get a free steak and mashed potatoes

and gravy and anything else he wanted, all prepared by other black

men in the kitchen. There was a bowl of Arts Festival buttons on the

table, and Eldon made Wayne put one on before he ate. “Wear this at

all times,” he told Wayne gravely, “and no harm can come to you.”

Eldon revealed to Wayne a peephole, which kitchen workers had

drilled through the wall and into the cocktail lounge. “When you get

tarred of watchin’ television,” he said, “you can watch the animals in

the zoo.”

Eldon himself had a look through the peephole, told Wayne that

there was a man seated at the piano bar who had been paid fifty

thousand dollars for sticking a piece of yellow tape to a green piece

of canvas. He insisted that Wayne take a good look at Karabekian.

Wayne obeyed.

And Wayne wanted to remove his eye from the peephole after a few

seconds, because he didn’t have nearly enough background

information for any sort of understanding of what was going on in the

cocktail lounge. The candles puzzled him, for instance. He supposed

that the electricity in there had failed, and that somebody had gone to

change a fuse. Also, he did not know what to make of Bonnie

MacMahon’s costume, which consisted of white cowboy boots and

black net stockings with crimson garters plainly showing across

several inches of bare thigh, and a tight sequin sort of bathing suit with

a puff of pink cotton pinned to its rear.

Bonnie’s back was to Wayne, so he could not see that she wore

octagonal, rimless trifocals, and was a horse-faced woman forty-two

years old. He could not see, either, that she was smiling, smiling,

smiling, no matter how insulting Karabekian became. He could read

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Karabekian’s lips, however. He was good at reading lips, as was

anyone who had spent any time in Shepherdstown. The rule of silence

was enforced in the corridors and at meals in Shepherdstown.

Karabekian was saying this to Bonnie, indicating Beatrice Keedsler

with a wave of his hand: “This distinguished lady is a famous

storyteller, and also a native of this railroad junction. Perhaps you

could tell her some recent true stories about her birthplace.”

“I don’t know any,” said Bonnie.

“Oh come now,” said Karabekian. “Every human being in this room

must be worth a great novel.” He pointed at Dwayne Hoover. “What is

the life story of that man?”

Bonnie limited herself to telling about Dwayne’s dog, Sparky, who

couldn’t wag his tail. “So he has to fight all the time,” she said.

“Wonderful,” said Karabekian. He turned to Beatrice. “I’m sure you can

use that somewhere.”

“As a matter of fact, I can,” said Beatrice. “That’s an enchanting detail.”

“The more details the better,” said Karabekian. “Thank God for

novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything

down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten!” He begged Bonnie for

more true stories.

Bonnie was deceived by his enthusiasm and energized by the idea

that Beatrice Keedsler honestly needed true stories for her books.

“Well—” she said, “would you consider Shepherdstown part of Midland

City, more or less?”

“Of course,” said Karabekian, who had never heard of Shepherdstown.

“What would Midland City be without Shepherdstown? And what would

Shepherdstown be without Midland City?”

“Well—” said Bonnie, and she thought she had what was maybe a

really good story to tell, “my husband is a guard at the

Shepherdstown Adult Correctional Institution, and he used to have to

keep people who were going to be electrocuted company—back

when they used to electrocute people all the time. He’d play cards

with them, or read parts of the Bible out loud to them, or whatever

they wanted to do, and he had to keep a white man named Leroy

Joyce company.”

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Bonnie’s costume gave off a faint, fishy, queer glow as she spoke. This

was because her garments were heavily impregnated with fluorescent

chemicals. So was the bartender’s jacket. So were the African masks

on the walls. The chemicals would shine like electric signs when

ultraviolet lights in the ceiling were energized. The lights weren’t on just

now. The bartender turned them on at random times, at his own whim,

in order to give the customers a delightful and mystifying surprise.

The power for the lights and for everything electrical in Midland City,

incidentally, was generated by coal from strip mines in West Virginia,

through which Kilgore Trout had passed not many hours before.

“Leroy Joyce was so dumb,” Bonnie went on, “he couldn’t play cards.

He couldn’t understand the Bible. He could hardly talk. He ate his last

supper, and then he sat still. He was going to be electrocuted for rape.

So my husband sat out in the corridor outside the cell, and he read to

himself. He heard Leroy moving around in his cell, but he didn’t worry

about it. And then Leroy rattled his tin cup on the bars. My husband

thought Leroy wanted some more coffee. So he got up and went over

and took the cup. Leroy was smiling as though everything was all right

now. He wouldn’t have to go to the electric chair after all. He’d cut off

his whatchamacallit and put it in the cup.”

This book is made up, of course, but the story I had Bonnie tell

actually happened in real life—in the death house of a penitentiary

in Arkansas.

As for Dwayne Hoover’s dog Sparky, who couldn’t wag his tail: Sparky

is modeled after a dog my brother owns who has to fight all the time,

because he can’t wag his tail. There really is such a dog.

Rabo Karabekian asked Bonnie MacMahon to tell him something

about the teen-age girl on the cover of the program for the Festival of

the Arts. This was the only internationally famous human being in

Midland City. She was Mary Alice Miller, the Women’s Two Hundred

Meter Breast Stroke Champion of the World. She was only fifteen,

said Bonnie.

Mary Alice was also the Queen of the Festival of the Arts. The cover

of the program showed her in a white bathing suit, with her Olympic

Gold Medal hanging around her neck. The medal looked like this:

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Mary Alice was smiling at a picture of Saint Sebastian, by the Spanish

painter El Greco. It had been loaned to the Festival by Eliot

Rosewater, the patron of Kilgore Trout. Saint Sebastian was a Roman

soldier who had lived seventeen hundred years before me and Mary

Alice Miller and Wayne and Dwayne and all the rest of us. He had

secretly become a Christian when Christianity was against the law.

And somebody squealed on him. The Emperor Diocletian had him

shot by archers. The picture Mary Alice smiled at with such uncritical

bliss showed a human being who was so full of arrows that he looked

like a porcupine.

Something almost nobody knew about Saint Sebastian, incidentally,

since painters liked to put so many arrows into him, was that he

survived the incident. He actually got well.

He walked around Rome praising Christianity and badmouthing the

Emperor, so he was sentenced to death a second time. He was

beaten to death by rods.

And so on.

And Bonnie MacMahon told Beatrice and Karabekian that Mary Alice’s

father, who was a member of the Parole Board out at Shepherdstown,

had taught Mary Alice to swim when she was eight months old, and

that he had made her swim at least four hours a day, every day, since

she was three.

Rabo Karabekian thought this over, and then he said loudly, so a lot of

people could hear him, “What kind of a man would turn his daughter

into an outboard motor?”

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And now comes the spiritual climax of this book, for it is at this point

that I, the author, am suddenly transformed by what I have done so

far. This is why I had gone to Midland City: to be born again. And

Chaos announced that it was about to give birth to a new me by

putting these words in the mouth of Rabo Karabekian: “What kind of a

man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor?”

Such a small remark was able to have such thundering consequences

because the spiritual matrix of the cocktail lounge was in what I

choose to call a pre-earthquake condition. Terrific forces were at work

on our souls, but they could do no work, because they balanced one

another so nicely.

But then a grain of sand crumbled. One force had a sudden advantage

over another, and spiritual continents began to shrug and heave.

One force, surely, was the lust for money which infested so many

people in the cocktail lounge. They knew what Rabo Karabekian had

been paid for his painting, and they wanted fifty thousand dollars, too.

They could have a lot of fun with fifty thousand dollars, or so they

believed. But they had to earn money the hard way, just a few dollars

at a time, instead. It wasn’t right.

Another force was the fear in these same people that their lives might

be ridiculous, that their entire city might be ridiculous. Now the worst

had happened: Mary Alice Miller, the one thing about their city which

they had supposed was ridicule-proof had just been lazily ridiculed by

a man from out-of-town.

And my own pre-earthquake condition must be taken into

consideration, too, since I was the one who was being reborn. Nobody

else in the cocktail lounge was reborn, as far as I know. The rest got

their minds changed, some of them, about the value of modern art.

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing

sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all

machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of

anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I

wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in

good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing

machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a

Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.

I did not expect Rabo Karabekian to rescue me. I had created him,

and he was in my opinion a vain and weak and trashy man, no artist at

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all. But it is Rabo Karabekian who made me the serene Earthling

which I am this day.

Listen:

“What kind of a man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor?”

he said to Bonnie MacMahon.

Bonnie MacMahon blew up. This was the first time she had blown up

since she had come to work in the cocktail lounge. Her voice became

as unpleasant as the noise of a bandsaw’s cutting galvanized tin. It

was loud, too. “Oh yeah?” she said. “Oh yeah?”

Everybody froze. Bunny Hoover stopped playing the piano. Nobody

wanted to miss a word.

“You don’t think much of Mary Alice Miller?” she said. “Well, we

don’t think much of your painting. I’ve seen better pictures done by

a five-year-old.”

Karabekian slid off his barstool so he could face all those enemies

standing up. He certainly surprised me. I expected him to retreat in a

hail of olives, maraschino cherries and lemon rinds. But he was

majestic up there “Listen—” he said so calmly, “I have read the

editorial against my painting in your wonderful newspaper. I have read

every word of the hate mail you have been thoughtful enough to send

to New York.”

This embarrassed people some.

“The painting did not exist until I made it,” Karabekian went on. “Now

that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it

reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the fiveyear-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and

playfully what it took me many angry years to find.

“I now give you my word of honor,” he went on, “that the picture your

city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing

left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the

immaterial core of every animal—the ‘I am’ to which all messages are

sent. It is all that is alive in any of us—in a mouse, in a deer, in a

cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what

preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint

Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach

were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such

bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in

any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

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“I have just heard from this cocktail waitress here, this vertical band of

light, a story about her husband and an idiot who was about to be

executed at Shepherdstown. Very well—let a five-year-old paint a

sacred interpretation of that encounter. Let that five-year-old strip

away the idiocy, the bars, the waiting electric chair, the uniform of the

guard, the gun of the guard, the bones and meat of the guard. What is

that perfect picture which any five-year-old can paint? Two

unwavering bands of light.”

Ecstasy bloomed on the barbaric face of Rabo Karabekian.

“Citizens of Midland City, I salute you,” he said. “You have given a

home to a masterpiece!”

Dwayne Hoover, incidentally, wasn’t taking any of this in. He was still

hypnotized, turned inward. He was thinking about moving fingers

writing and moving on, and so forth. He had bats in his bell tower. He

was off his rocker. He wasn’t playing with a full deck of cards.

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Chapter 20

While my life was being renewed by the words of Rabo Karabekian,

Kilgore Trout found himself standing on the shoulder of the Interstate,

gazing across Sugar Creek in its concrete trough at the new Holiday

Inn. There were no bridges across the creek. He would have to wade.

So he sat down on a guardrail, removed his shoes and socks, rolled

his pantlegs to his knees. His bared shins were rococo with varicose

veins and scars. So were the shins of my father when he was an old,

old man.

Kilgore Trout had my father’s shins. They were a present from me. I

gave him my father’s feet, too, which were long and narrow and

sensitive. They were azure. They were artistic feet.

Trout lowered his artistic feet into the concrete trough containing

Sugar Creek. They were coated at once with a clear plastic substance

from the surface of the creek. When, in some surprise, Trout lifted one

coated foot from the water, the plastic substance dried in air instantly,

sheathed his foot in a thin, skin-tight bootie resembling mother-ofpearl. He repeated the process with his other foot.

The substance was coming from the Barrytron plant. The company

was manufacturing a new anti-personnel bomb for the Air Force. The

bomb scattered plastic pellets instead of steel pellets, because the

plastic pellets were cheaper. They were also impossible to locate in

the bodies of wounded enemies by means of x-ray machines.

Barrytron had no idea it was dumping this waste into Sugar Creek.

They had hired the Maritimo Brothers Construction Company, which

was gangster-controlled, to build a system which would get rid of the

waste. They knew the company was gangster-controlled. Everybody

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knew that. But the Maritimo Brothers were usually the best builders in

town. They had built Dwayne Hoover’s house, for instance, which was

a solid house.

But every so often they would do something amazingly criminal. The

Barrytron disposal system was a case in point. It was expensive, and

it appeared to be complicated and busy. Actually, though, it was old

junk hooked up every which way, concealing a straight run of stolen

sewer pipe running directly from Barrytron to Sugar Creek.

Barrytron would be absolutely sick when it learned what a polluter it

had become. Throughout its history, it had attempted to be a perfect

model of corporate good citizenship, no matter what it cost.

Trout now crossed Sugar Creek on my father’s legs and feet, and

those appendages became more nacreous with every wading stride.

He carried his parcels and his shoes and socks on his head, although

the water scarcely reached his kneecaps.

He knew how ridiculous he looked. He expected to be received

abominably, dreamed of embarrassing the Festival to death. He had

come all this distance for an orgy of masochism. He wanted to be

treated like a cockroach.

His situation, insofar as he was a machine, was complex, tragic, and

laughable. But the sacred part of him, his awareness, remained an

unwavering band of light.

And this book is being written by a meat machine in cooperation with a

machine made of metal and plastic. The plastic, incidentally, is a close

relative of the gunk in Sugar Creek. And at the core of the writing meat

machine is something sacred, which is an unwavering band of light.

At the core of each person who reads this book is a band of

unwavering light.

My doorbell has just rung in my New York apartment. And I know what

I will find when I open my front door: an unwavering band of light.

God bless Rabo Karabekian!

Listen: Kilgore Trout climbed out of the trough and onto the asphalt

desert which was the parking lot. It was his plan to enter the lobby

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of the Inn on wet bare feet, to leave footprints on the carpet—

like this:

It was Trout’s fantasy that somebody would be outraged by the

footprints. This would give him the opportunity to reply grandly, “What

is it that offends you so? I am simply using man’s first printing press.

You are reading a bold and universal headline which says, ‘I am here,

I am here, I am here.’”

But Trout was no walking printing press. His feet left no marks on the

carpet, because they were sheathed in plastic and the plastic was dry.

Here was the structure of the plastic molecule:

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The molecule went on and on and on, repeating itself forever to form a

sheet both tough and poreless.

This molecule was the monster Dwayne’s twin stepbrothers, Lyle and

Kyle, had attacked with their automatic shotguns. This was the stuff

which wasS fucking up Sacred Miracle Cave.

The man who told me how to diagram a segment of a molecule of

plastic was Professor Walter H. Stockmayer of Dartmouth College. He

is a distinguished physical chemist, and an amusing and useful friend

of mine. I did not make him up. I would like to be Professor Walter H.

Stockmayer. He is a brilliant pianist. He skis like a dream.

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178

And when he sketched a plausible molecule, he indicated points

where it would go on and on just as I have indicated them—with an

abbreviation which means sameness without end.

The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since

life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should

be that same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like

it, which is this one:

And it is in order to acknowledge the continuity of this polymer that I

begin so many sentences with “And” and “So,” and end so many

paragraphs with “. . . and so on.”

And so on.

“It’s all like an ocean!” cried Dostoevski. I say it’s all like cellophane.

So Trout entered the lobby as an inkless printing press, but he was

still the most grotesque human being who had ever come in there.

All around him were what other people called mirrors, which he called

leaks. The entire wall which separated the lobby from the cocktail

lounge was a leak ten feet high and thirty-feet long. There was

another leak on the cigarette machine and yet another on the candy

machine. And when Trout looked through them to see what was going

on in the other universe, he saw a red-eyed, filthy old creature who

was barefoot, who had his pants rolled up to his knees.

As it happened, the only other person in the lobby at the time was the

beautiful young desk clerk, Milo Maritimo. Milo’s clothing and skin and

eyes were all the colors that olives can be. He was a graduate of the

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Cornell Hotel School. He was the homosexual grandson of Guillermo

“Little Willie” Maritimo, a bodyguard of the notorious Chicago

gangster, Al Capone.

Trout presented himself to this harmless man, stood before his desk

with his bare feet far apart and his arms outspread. “The Abominable

Snowman has arrived,” he said to Milo. “If I’m not as clean as most

abominable snowmen are, it is because I was kidnapped as a child

from the slopes of Mount Everest, and taken as a slave to a bordello

in Rio de Janeiro, where I have been cleaning the unspeakably filthy

toilets for the past fifty years. A visitor to our whipping room there

screamed in a transport of agony and ecstasy that there was to be an

arts festival in Midland City. I escaped down a rope of sheets taken

from a reeking hamper. I have come to Midland City to have myself

acknowledged, before I die, as the great artist I believe myself to be.”

Milo Maritimo greeted Trout with luminous adoration. “Mr. Trout,” he

said in rapture, “I’d know you anywhere. Welcome to Midland City. We

need you so!”

“How do you know who I am?” said Kilgore Trout. Nobody had ever

known who he was before.

“You had to be you,” said Milo.

Trout was deflated— neutralized. He dropped his arms, became childlike now. “Nobody ever knew who I was before,” he said.

“I know,” said Milo. “We have discovered you, and we hope you will

discover us. No longer will Midland City be known merely as the home

of Mary Alice Miller, the Women’s Two Hundred Meter Breast Stroke

Champion of the World. It will also be the city which first

acknowledged the greatness of Kilgore Trout.”

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

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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.

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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

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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.

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Chapter 21

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.

Dwayne Hoover was still mentally absent from activities in the cocktail

lounge. He sat like a lump of nose putty, staring at something long ago

and far away.

Dwayne moved his lips as Trout sat down. He was saying this

soundlessly, and it had nothing to do with Trout or me: “Goodbye,

Blue Monday.”

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Trout had a fat manila envelope with him. Milo Maritimo had given it to

him. It contained a program for the Festival of the Arts, a letter of

welcome to Trout from Fred T. Barry, the Chairman of the Festival, a

timetable of events during the coming week—and some other things.

Trout also carried a copy of his novel Now It Can Be Told. This was

the wide-open beaver book which Dwayne Hoover would soon take

so seriously.

So there the three of us were. Dwayne and Trout and I could have

been included in an equilateral triangle about twelve feet on a side.

As three unwavering bands of light, we were simple and separate and

beautiful. As machines, we were flabby bags of ancient plumbing and

wiring, of rusty hinges and feeble springs. And our interrelationships

were Byzantine.

After all, I had created both Dwayne and Trout, and now Trout was

about to drive Dwayne into full-blown insanity, and Dwayne would

soon bite off the tip of Trout’s finger.

Wayne Hoobler was watching us through a peephole in the kitchen.

There was a tap on his shoulder. The man who had fed him now told

him to leave.

So he wandered outdoors, and he found himself among Dwayne’s

used cars again. He resumed his conversation with the traffic on

the Interstate.

The bartender in the cocktail lounge now flicked on the ultraviolet

lights in the ceiling. Bonnie MacMahon’s uniform, since it was

impregnated with fluorescent materials, lit up like an electric sign.

So did the bartender’s jacket and the African masks on the walls.

So did Dwayne Hoover’s shirt, and the shirts of several other men.

The reason was this: Those shirts had been laundered in washday

products which contained fluorescent materials. The idea was to make

clothes look brighter in sunlight by making them actually fluorescent.

When the same clothes were viewed in a dark room under ultraviolet

light, however, they became ridiculously bright.

Bunny Hoover’s teeth also lit up, since he used a toothpaste

containing fluorescent materials, which was supposed to make his

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smile look brighter in daylight. He grinned now, and he appeared to

have a mouthful of little Christmas tree lights.

But the brightest new light in the room by far was the bosom of Kilgore

Trout’s new evening shirt. Its brilliance twinkled and had depth. It might

have been the top of a slumping, open sack of radioactive diamonds.

But then Trout hunched forward involuntarily, buckling the starched

shirt bosom, forming it into a parabolic dish. This made a searchlight

of the shirt. Its beam was aimed at Dwayne Hoover.

The sudden light roused Dwayne from his trance. He thought

perhaps he had died. At any rate, something painless and

supernatural was going on. Dwayne smiled trustingly at the holy

light. He was ready for anything.

Trout had no explanation for the fantastic transformation of certain

garments around the room. Like most science-fiction writers, he knew

almost nothing about science. He had no more use for solid information

than did Rabo Karabekian. So now he could only be flabbergasted.

My own shirt, being an old one which had been washed many times in

a Chinese laundry which used ordinary soap, did not fluoresce.

Dwayne Hoover now lost himself in the bosom of Trout’s shirt, just as he

had earlier lost himself in twinkling beads of lemon oil. He remembered

now a thing his stepfather had told him when he was only ten years old,

which was this: Why there were no Niggers in Shepherdstown.

This was not a completely irrelevant recollection. Dwayne had, after

all, been talking to Bonnie MacMahon, whose husband had lost so

much money in a car wash in Shepherdstown. And the main reason

the car wash had failed was that successful car washes needed cheap

and plentiful labor, which meant black labor—and there were no

Niggers in Shepherdstown.

“Years ago,” Dwayne’s stepfather told Dwayne when Dwayne was ten,

“Niggers was coming up north by the millions—to Chicago, to Midland

City, to Indianapolis, to Detroit. The World War was going on. There

was such a labor shortage that even Niggers who couldn’t read or

write could get good factory jobs. Niggers had money like they never

had before.

“Over at Shepherdstown, though,” he went on, “the white people got

smart quick. They didn’t want Niggers in their town, so they put up

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signs on the main roads at the city limits and in the railroad yard.”

Dwayne’s stepfather described the signs, which looked like this:

“One night—” Dwayne’s stepfather said, “a Nigger family got off a

boxcar in Shepherdstown. Maybe they didn’t see the sign. Maybe they

couldn’t read it. Maybe they couldn’t believe it.” Dwayne’s stepfather

was out of work when he told the story so gleefully. The Great

Depression had just begun. He and Dwayne were on a weekly

expedition in the family car, hauling garbage and trash out into the

country, where they dumped it all in Sugar Creek.

“Anyway, they moved into an empty shack that night,” Dwayne’s

stepfather went on. “They got a fire going in the stove and all. So a

mob went down there at midnight. They took out the man, and they

sawed him in two on the top strand of a barbed-wire fence.” Dwayne

remembered clearly that a rainbow of oil from the trash was spreading

prettily over the surface of Sugar Creek when he heard that.

“Since that night, which was a long time ago now,” his stepfather said,

“there ain’t been a Nigger even spend the night in Shepherdstown.

Trout was itchingly aware that Dwayne was staring at his bosom so

loonily. Dwayne’s eyes swam, and Trout supposed they were

swimming in alcohol. He could not know that Dwayne was seeing

an oil slick on Sugar Creek which had made rainbows forty long

years ago.

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Trout was aware of me, too, what little he could see of me. I made him

even more uneasy than Dwayne did. The thing was: Trout was the

only character I ever created who had enough imagination to suspect

that he might be the creation of another human being. He had spoken

of this possibility several times to his parakeet. He had said, for

instance, “Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think

of is that I’m a character in a book by somebody who wants to write

about somebody who suffers all the time.”

Now Trout was beginning to catch on that he was sitting very close to

the person who had created him. He was embarrassed. It was hard for

him to know how to respond, particularly since his responses were

going to be anything I said they were.

I went easy on him, didn’t wave, didn’t stare. I kept my glasses on. I

wrote again on my tabletop, scrawled the symbols for the

interrelationship between matter and energy as it was understood in

my day:

It was a flawed equation, as far as I was concerned. There should

have been an “A” in there somewhere for Awareness—without which

the “E” and the “M” and the “c,” which was a mathematical constant;

could not exist.

All of us were stuck to the surface of a ball, incidentally. The planet

was ball-shaped. Nobody knew why we didn’t fall off, even though

everybody pretended to kind of understand it.

The really smart people understood that one of the best ways to get

rich was to own a part of the surface people had to stick to.

Trout dreaded eye contact with either Dwayne or me, so he went

through the contents of the manila envelope which had been waiting

for him in his suite.

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The first thing he examined was a letter from Fred T. Barry, the

Chairman of the Festival of the Arts, the donor of the Mildred Barry

Memorial Center for the Arts, and the founder and Chairman of the

Board of Directors of Barrytron, Ltd.

Clipped to the letter was one share of common stock in Barrytron,

made out in the name of Kilgore Trout. Here was the letter:

“Dear Mr. Trout:” it said, “It is a pleasure and an honor to have such a

distinguished and creative person give his precious time to Midland

City’s first Festival of the Arts. It is our wish that you feel like a

member of our family while you are here. To give you and other

distinguished visitors a deeper sense of participation in the life of our

community, I am making a gift to each of you of one share in the

company which I founded, the company of which I am now Chairman

of the Board. It is not only my company now, but yours as well.

“Our company began as The Robo-Magic Corporation of America in

1934. It had three employees in the beginning, and its mission was to

design and manufacture the first fully automatic washing machine for

use in the home. You will find the motto of that washing machine on

the corporate emblem at the top of the stock certificate.”

The emblem consisted of a Greek goddess on an ornate chaise

longue. She held a flagstaff from which a long pennant streamed.

Here is what the pennant said:

The motto of the old Robo-Magic washing machine cleverly confused

two separate ideas people had about Monday. One idea was that

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women traditionally did their laundry Monday. Monday was simply

washday, and not an especially depressing day on that account.

People who had horrible jobs during the week used to Monday “Blue

Monday” sometimes, though, because they hated to return to work

after a day of rest. When Fred T. Barry made up the Robo-Magic

motto as a young man, he pretended that Monday was called “Blue

Monday” because doing the laundry disgusted and exhausted women.

The Robo-Magic was going to cheer them up.

It wasn’t true, incidentally, that most women did their laundry on Monday

at the time the Robo-Magic was invented. They did it any time they felt

like it. One of Dwayne Hoover’s clearest recollections from the Great

Depression, for instance, was when his stepmother decided to do the

laundry Christmas Eve. She was bitter about the low estate to which the

family had fallen, and she suddenly clumped down into the basement,

down among the black beetles and the millipedes, and did the laundry.

“Time to do the Nigger work,” she said.

Fred T. Barry began advertising the Robo-Magic in 1933, long before

there was a reliable machine to sell. And he was one of the few persons

in Midland City who could afford billboard advertising during the Great

Depression, so the Robo-Magic sales message did not have to jostle

and shriek for attention. It was practically the only symbol in town.

One of Fred’s ads was on a billboard outside the main gate of the

defunct Keedsler Automobile Company, which the Robo-Magic

Corporation had taken over. It showed a high society woman in a fur

coat and pearls. She was leaving her mansion for a pleasant

afternoon of idleness, and a balloon was coming out of her mouth.

These were the words in the balloon:

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Another ad, which was painted on a billboard by the railroad depot,

showed two white deliverymen who were bringing a Robo-Magic into a

house. A black maid was watching them. Her eyes were popping out

in a comical way. There was a balloon coming out of her mouth, too,

and she was saying this:

Fred T. Barry wrote these ads himself, and he predicted at the time

that Robo-Magic appliances of various sorts would eventually do what

he called “all the Nigger work of the world,” which was lifting and

cleaning and cooking and washing and ironing and tending children

and dealing with filth.

Dwayne Hoover’s stepmother wasn’t the only white woman who was a

terrible sport about doing work like that. My own mother was that way,

too, and so was my sister, may she rest in peace. They both flatly

refused to do Nigger work.

The white men wouldn’t do it either, of course. They called it women’s

work, and the women called it Nigger work.

I am going to make a wild guess now: I think that the end of the Civil

War in my country frustrated the white people in the North, who won it,

in a way which has never been acknowledged before. Their

descendants inherited that frustration, I think, without ever knowing

what it was.

The victors in that war were cheated out of the most desirable spoils

of that war, which were human slaves.

The Robo-Magic dream was interrupted by World War Two. The old

Keedsler Automobile Works became an armory instead of an

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appliance factory. Al that survived of the Robo-Magic itself was its

brain, which had told the rest of the machine when to let the water in,

when to let the water out, when to slosh, when to rinse, when to spin

dry, and so on.

That brain became the nerve center of the so-called “BLINC System”

during the Second World War. It was installed on heavy bombers, and

it did the actual dropping of bombs after a bombardier pressed his

bright red “bombs away” button. The button activated the BLINC

System, which then released the bombs in such a way as to achieve a

desired pattern of explosions on the planet below. “BLINC” was an

abbreviation of “Blast Interval Normalization Computer.”

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Chapter 22

And I sat there in the cocktail lounge of the new Holiday Inn, watching

Dwayne Hoover stare into the bosom of the shirt of Kilgore Trout. I

was wearing a bracelet which looked like this:

WO1 stood for Warrant Officer First Class, which was the rank of

Jon Sparks.

The bracelet had cost me two dollars and a half. It was a way of

expressing my pity for the hundreds of Americans who had been

taken prisoner during the war in Viet Nam. Such bracelets were

becoming popular. Each one bore the name of an actual prisoner of

war, his rank, and the date of his capture.

Wearers of the bracelets weren’t supposed to take them off until the

prisoners came home or were reported dead or missing.

I wondered how I might fit my bracelet into my story, and hit on the

good idea of dropping it somewhere for Wayne Hoobler to find.

Wayne would assume that it belonged to a woman who loved somebody

named WO1 Jon Sparks, and that the woman and WO1 had become

engaged or married or something important on March 19th, 1971.

Wayne would mouth the unusual first name tentatively. “Woo- ee?” he

would say. “Woe-ee? Woe-eye? Woy?”

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There in the cocktail lounge, I gave Dwayne Hoover credit for having

taken a course in speed-reading at night at the Young Men’s Christian

Association. This would enable him to read Kilgore Trout’s novel in

minutes instead of hours.

There in the cocktail lounge, I took a white pill which a doctor said I

could take in moderation, two a day, in order not to feel blue.

There in the cocktail lounge, the pill and the alcohol gave me a terrific

sense of urgency about explaining all the things I hadn’t explained yet,

and then hurtling on with my tale.

Let’s see: I have already explained Dwayne’s uncharacteristic ability

to read so fast. Kilgore Trout probably couldn’t have made his trip from

New York City in the time I allotted, but it’s too late to bugger around

with that. Let it stand, let it stand!

Let’s see, let’s see. Oh, yes—I have to explain a jacket Trout will see

at the hospital. It will look like this from the back:

Here is the explanation: There used to be only one Nigger high school

in Midland City, and it was an all-Nigger high school still. It was named

after Crispus Attucks, a black man who was shot by British troops in

Boston in 1770. There was an oil painting of this event in the main

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corridor of the school. Several white people were stopping bullets, too.

Crispus Attucks himself had a hole in his forehead which looked like

the front door of a birdhouse.

But the black people didn’t call the school Crispus Attucks High

School anymore. They called it Innocent Bystander High.

And when another Nigger high school was built after the Second

World War, it was named after George Washington Carver, a black

man who was born into slavery, but who became a famous chemist

anyway. He discovered many remarkable new uses for peanuts.

But the black people wouldn’t call that school by its proper name,

either. On the day it opened, there were already young black people

wearing jackets which looked like this from the back:

I have to explain, too, see, why so many black people in Midland City

were able to imitate birds from various parts of what used to be the

British Empire. The thing was, see, that Fred T. Barry and his mother

and father were almost the only people in Midland City who could

afford to hire Niggers to do the Nigger work during the Great

Depression. They took over the old Keedsler Mansion, where Beatrice

Keedsler, the novelist, had been born. They had as many as twenty

servants working there, all at one time.

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Fred’s father got so much money during the prosperity of the twenties

as a bootlegger and as a swindler in stocks and bonds. He kept all his

money in cash, which turned out to be a bright thing to do, since so

many banks failed during the Great Depression. Also: Fred’s father

was an agent for Chicago gangsters who wanted to buy legitimate

businesses for their children and grandchildren. Through Fred’s father,

those gangsters bought almost every desirable property in Midland City

for anything from a tenth to a hundredth of what it was really worth.

And before Fred’s mother and father came to the United States after

the First World War, they were music hall entertainers in England.

Fred’s father played the musical saw. His mother imitated birds from

various parts of what was still the British Empire.

She went on imitating them for her own amusement, well into the

Great Depression. “The Bulbul of Malaysia,” she would say, for

instance, and then she would imitate that bird.

“The Morepark Owl of New Zealand,” she would say, and then she

would imitate that bird.

And all the black people who worked for her thought her act was the

funniest thing they had ever seen, though they never laughed out loud

when she did it. And, in order to double up their friends and relatives

with laughter, they, too, learned how to imitate the birds.

The craze spread. Black people who had never been near the

Keedsler mansion could imitate the Lyre Bird and the Willy Wagtail of

Australia, the Golden Oriole of India, the Nightingale and the Chaffinch

and the Wren and the Chiffchaff of England itself.

They could even imitate the happy screech of the extinct companion

of Kilgore Trout’s island childhood, which was the Bermuda Ern.

When Kilgore Trout hit town, the black people could still imitate those

birds, and say word for word what Fred’s mother had said before

each imitation. If one of them imitated a Nightingale, for instance, he

or she would say this first: “What adds peculiar beauty to the call of

the Nightingale, much beloved by poets, is the fact that it will only

sing by moonlight.”

And so on.

There in the cocktail lounge, Dwayne Hoover’s bad chemicals

suddenly decided that it was time for Dwayne to demand from Kilgore

Trout the secrets of life.

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“Give me the message,” cried Dwayne. He tottered up from his own

banquette, crashed down again next to Trout, throwing off heat like a

steam radiator. “The message, please.”

And here Dwayne did something extraordinarily unnatural. He did it

because I wanted him to. It was something I had ached to have a

character do for years and years. Dwayne did to Trout what the

Duchess did to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in

Wonderland. He rested his chin on poor Trout’s shoulder, dug in with

his chin.

“The message?” he said, digging in his chin, digging in his chin.

Trout made no reply. He had hoped to get through what little remained

of his life without ever having to touch another human being again.

Dwayne’s chin on his shoulder was as shattering as buggery to Trout.

“Is this it? Is this it?” said Dwayne, snatching up Trout’s novel, Now It

Can Be Told.

“Yes—that’s it,” croaked Trout. To his tremendous relief, Dwayne

removed his chin from his shoulder.

Dwayne now began to read hungrily, as though starved for print. And

the speed-reading course he had taken at the Young Men’s Christian

Association allowed him to make a perfect pig of himself with pages

and words.

“Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir:” he read, “You are an experiment by the

Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire

Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out

what to do next—and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine.

“Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you

must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines.

“You are pooped and demoralized,” read Dwayne. “Why wouldn’t you

be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a

universe which wasn’t meant to be reasonable.”

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Chapter 23

Dwayne Hoover read on: “You are surrounded by loving machines,

hating machines, greedy machines, unselfish machines, brave

machines, cowardly machines, truthful machines, lying machines,

funny machines, solemn machines,” he read. “Their only purpose is to

stir you up in every conceivable way, so the Creator of the Universe

can watch your reactions. They can no more feel or reason than

grandfather clocks.

“The Creator of the Universe would now like to apologize not only for

the capricious, jostling companionship he provided during the test, but

for the trashy, stinking condition of the planet itself. The Creator

programmed robots to abuse it for millions of years, so it would be a

poisonous, festering cheese when you got here. Also, He made sure it

would be desperately crowded by programming robots, regardless of

their living conditions, to crave sexual intercourse and adore infants

more than almost anything.”

Mary Alice Miller, incidentally, the Women’s Breast Stroke Champion

of the World and Queen of the Arts Festival, now passed through the

cocktail lounge. She made a shortcut to the lobby from the side

parking lot, where her father was waiting for her in his avocado 1970

Plymouth Barracuda fastback, which he had bought as a used car

from Dwayne. It had a new car guarantee.

Mary Alice’s father, Don Miller, was, among other things, Chairman of

the Parole Board at Shepherdstown. It was he who had decided that

Wayne Hoobler, lurking among Dwayne’s used cars again, was fit to

take his place in society.

Mary Alice went into the lobby to get a crown and scepter for her

performance as Queen at the Arts Festival banquet that night. Milo

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Maritimo, the desk clerk, the gangster’s grandson, had made them

with his own two hands. Her eyes were permanently inflamed. They

looked like maraschino cherries.

Only one person noticed her sufficiently to comment out loud. He

was Abe Cohen, the jeweler. He said this about Mary Alice,

despising her sexlessness and innocence and empty mind: “Pure

tuna fish!”

Kilgore Trout heard him say that—about pure tuna fish. His mind tried

to make sense of it. His mind was swamped with mysteries. He might

as well have been Wayne Hoobler, adrift among Dwayne’s used cars

during Hawaiian Week.

His feet, which were sheathed in plastic, were meanwhile getting

hotter all the time. The heat was painful now. His feet were curling

and twisting, begging to be plunged into cold water or waved in

the air.

And Dwayne read on about himself and the Creator of the Universe,

to wit:

“He also programmed robots to write books and magazines and

newspapers for you, and television and radio shows, and stage

shows, and films. They wrote songs for you. The Creator of the

Universe had them invent hundreds of religions, so you would

have plenty to choose among. He had them kill each other by

the millions, for this purpose only: that you be amazed. They

have committed every possible atrocity and every possible

kindness unfeelingly, automatically, inevitably, to get a reaction

from Y-O-U.”

This last word was set in extra-large type and had a line all to itself, so

it looked like this:

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“Every time you went into the library,” said the book, “the Creator

of the Universe held His breath. With such a higgledy-piggledy

cultural smorgasbord before you, what would you, with your free

will, choose?”

“Your parents were fighting machines and self-pitying machines,” said

the book. “Your mother was programmed to bawl out your father for

being a defective moneymaking machine, and your father was

programmed to bawl her out for being a defective housekeeping

machine. They were programmed to bawl each other out for being

defective loving machines.

“Then your father was programmed to stomp out of the house and

slam the door. This automatically turned your mother into a weeping

machine. And your father would go down to a tavern where he

would get drunk with some other drinking machines. Then all the

drinking machines would go to a whorehouse and rent fucking

machines. And then your father would drag himself home to become

an apologizing machine. And your mother would become a very

slow forgiving machine.”

Dwayne got to his feet now, having wolfed down tens of thousands of

words of such solipsistic whimsey in ten minutes or so.

He walked stiffly over to the piano bar. What made him stiff was his

awe of his own strength and righteousness. He dared not use his full

strength in merely walking, for fear of destroying the new Holiday Inn

with footfalls. He did not fear for his own life, Trout’s book assured

him that he had already been killed twenty-three times. On each

occasion, the Creator of the Universe had patched him up and got

him going again.

Dwayne restrained himself in the name of elegance rather than safety.

He was going to respond to his new understanding of life with finesse,

for an audience of two—himself and his Creator.

He approached his homosexual son.

Bunny saw the trouble coming, supposed it was death. He

might have protected himself easily with all the techniques of

fighting he had learned in military school. But he chose to meditate

instead. He closed his eyes, and his awareness sank into the

silence of the unused lobes of his mind. This phosphorescent scarf

floated by:

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Dwayne shoved Bunny’s head from behind. He rolled it like a

cantaloupe up and down the keys of the piano bar. Dwayne laughed,

and he called his son “. . . a God damn cock-sucking machine!”

Bunny did not resist him, even though Bunny’s face was being

mangled horribly. Dwayne hauled his head from the keys, slammed it

down again. There was blood on the keys—and spit, and mucus.

Rabo Karabekian and Beatrice Keedsler and Bonnie MacMahon all

grabbed Dwayne now, pulled him away from Bunny. This increased

Dwayne’s glee. “Never hit a woman, right?” he said to the Creator of

the Universe.

He then socked Beatrice Keedsler on the jaw. He punched Bonnie

MacMahon in the belly. He honestly believed that they were

unfeeling machines.

“All you robots want to know why my wife ate Dr‚no?” Dwayne

asked his thunderstruck audience. “I’ll tell you why: She was that

kind of machine!”

There was a map of Dwayne’s rampage in the paper the next

morning. The dotted line of his route started in the cocktail lounge,

crossed the asphalt to Francine Pefko’s office in his automobile

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agency, doubled back to the new Holiday Inn again, then crossed

Sugar Creek and the Westbound lane of the Interstate to the median

divider, which was grass. Dwayne was subdued on the median divider

by two State Policemen who happened by.

Here is what Dwayne said to the policemen as they cuffed his hands

behind his back: “Thank God you’re here!”

Dwayne didn’t kill anybody on his rampage, but he hurt eleven people

so badly they had to go to the hospital. And on the map in the

newspaper there was a mark indicating each place where a person

had been injured seriously. This was the mark, greatly enlarged:

In the newspaper map of Dwayne’s rampage, there were three such

crosses inside the cocktail lounge—for Bunny and Beatrice Keedsler

and Bonnie MacMahon.

Then Dwayne ran out onto the asphalt between the Inn and his used

car lot. He yelled for Niggers out there, telling them to come at once. “I

want to talk to you,” he said.

He was out there all alone. Nobody from the cocktail lounge had

followed him yet. Mary Alice Miller’s father, Don Miller, was in his

car near Dwayne, waiting for Mary Alice to come back with her

crown and scepter, but he never saw anything of the show Dwayne

put on. His car had seats whose backs could be made to lie flat.

They could be made into beds. Don was lying on his back, with his

head well below window level, resting, staring at the ceiling. He was

trying to learn French by means of listening to lessons recorded

on tape.

“Demain nous allons passer la soirée au cinéma,” said the tape, and

Don tried to say it, too. “Nous espérons que notre grand-père vivra

encore longtemps,” said the tape. And so on.

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Dwayne went on calling for Niggers to come talk to him. He smiled. He

thought that the Creator of the Universe had programmed them all to

hide, as a joke.

Dwayne glanced around craftily. Then he called out a signal he had

used as a child to indicate that a game of hide-and-seek was over,

that it was time for children in hiding to go home.

Here is what he called, and the sun was down when he called it: “Ollyolly-ox-in-freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”

The person who answered this incantation was a person who had

never played hide-and-seek in his life. It was Wayne Hoobler, who

came out from among the used cars quietly. He clasped his hands

behind his back and placed his feet apart. He assumed the position

known as parade rest. This position was taught to soldiers and

prisoners alike—as a way of demonstrating attentiveness, gullibility,

respect, and voluntary defenselessness. He was ready for anything,

and wouldn’t mind death.

“There you are,” said Dwayne, and his eyes crinkled in bittersweet

amusement. He didn’t know who Wayne was. He welcomed him as a

typical black robot. Any other black robot would have served as well.

And Dwayne again carried on a wry talk with the Creator of the

Universe, using a robot as an unfeeling conversation piece. A lot of

people in Midland City put useless objects from Hawaii or Mexico or

someplace like that on their coffee tables or their livingroom end

tables or on what-not shelves—and such an object was called a

conversation piece.

Wayne remained at parade rest while Dwayne told of his year as a

County Executive for the Boy Scouts of America, when more black

young people were brought into scouting than in any previous year.

Dwayne told Wayne about his efforts to save the life of a young black

man named Payton Brown, who, at the age of fifteen and a half,

became the youngest person ever to die in the electric chair at

Shepherdstown. Dwayne rambled on about all the black people he

had hired when nobody else would hire black people, about how they

never seemed to be able to get to work on time. He mentioned a few,

too, who had been energetic and punctual, and he winked at Wayne,

and he said this: “They were programmed that way.”

He spoke of his wife and son again, acknowledged that white robots

were just like black robots, essentially, in that they were programmed

to be whatever they were, to do whatever they did.

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Dwayne was silent for a moment after that.

Mary Alice Miller’s father was meanwhile continuing to learn

conversational French while lying down in his automobile, only a few

yards away.

And then Dwayne took a swing at Wayne. He meant to slap him hard

with his open hand, but Wayne was very good at ducking. He

dropped to his knees as the hand swished through the air where his

face had been.

Dwayne laughed. “African dodger!” he said. This had reference to a

sort of carnival booth which was popular when Dwayne was a boy. A

black man would stick his head through a hole in a piece of canvas

at the back of a booth, and people would pay money for the privilege

of throwing hard baseballs at his head. If they hit his head, they won

a prize.

So Dwayne thought that the Creator of the Universe had invited him to

play a game of African dodger now. He became cunning, concealed

his violent intentions with apparent boredom. Then he kicked at

Wayne very suddenly.

Wayne dodged again, and had to dodge yet again almost instantly,

as Dwayne advanced with quick combinations of intended kicks,

slaps, and punches. And Wayne vaulted onto the bed of a very

unusual truck, which had been built on the chassis of a 1962

Cadillac limousine. It had belonged to the Maritimo Brothers

Construction Company.

Wayne’s new elevation gave him a view past Dwayne of both barrels

of the Interstate, and of a mile or more of Will Fairchild Memorial

Airport, which lay beyond. And it is important to understand at this

point that Wayne had never seen an airport before, was unprepared

for what could happen to an airport when a plane came in at night.

“That’s all right, that’s all right,” Dwayne assured Wayne. He was

being a very good sport. He had no intention of climbing up on truck

for another swing at Wayne. He was winded, for one thing. For

another, he understood that Wayne was a perfect dodging machine.

Only a perfect hitting machine could hit him. “You’re too good for me,”

said Dwayne.

So Dwayne backed away some, contented himself with preaching up

at Wayne. He spoke about human slavery—not only black slaves, but

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white slaves, too. Dwayne regarded coal miners and workers on

assembly lines and so forth as slaves, no matter what color they were.

“I used to think that was such a shame,” he said. “I used to think the

electric chair was a shame. I used to think war was a shame—and

automobile accidents and cancer,” he said, and so on.

He didn’t think they were shames anymore. “Why should I care what

happens to machines?” he said.

Wayne Hoobler’s face had been blank so far, but now it began to

bloom with uncontrollable awe. His mouth fell open.

The runway lights of Will Fairchild Memorial Airport had just come on.

Those lights looked like miles and miles of bewilderingly beautiful

jewelry to Wayne. He was seeing a dream come true on the other side

of the Interstate.

The inside of Wayne’s head lit up in recognition of that dream, lit up with

an electric sign which gave a childish name to the dream—like this:

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Chapter 24

Listen: Dwayne Hoover hurt so many people seriously that a special

ambulance known as Martha was called, Martha was a full-sized

General Motors transcontinental bus, but with the seats removed.

There were beds for thirty-six disaster victims in there, plus a kitchen

and a bathroom and an operating room. It had enough food and

medical supplies aboard to serve as an independent little hospital for a

week without help from the outside world.

Its full name was The Martha Simmons Memorial Mobile Disaster

Unit, named in honor of the wife of Newbolt Simmons, a County

Commissioner of Public Safety. She had died of rabies contracted

from a sick bat she found clinging to her floor-to-ceiling livingroom

draperies one morning. She had just been reading a biography of

Albert Schweitzer, who believed that human beings should treat

simpler animals lovingly. The bat nipped her ever so slightly as she

wrapped it in Kleenex, a face tissue. She carried it out onto her

patio, where she laid it gently on a form of artificial grass known

as Astroturf.

She had thirty-six-inch hips, a twenty-nine-inch waist, and a thirtyeight-inch bosom at the time of her death. Her husband had a penis

seven and a half inches long and two inches in diameter.

He and Dwayne were drawn together for a while—because his wife

and Dwayne’s wife had died such strange deaths within a month of

each other.

They bought a gravel pit together, out on Route 23A, but then the

Maritimo Brothers Construction Company offered them twice what

they had paid for it. So they accepted the offer and divided up the

profits, and the friendship petered out somehow. They still exchanged

Christmas cards.

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Dwayne’s most recent Christmas card to Newbolt Simmons looked

like this:

Newbolt Simmons’ most recent Christmas card to Dwayne looked

like this:

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My psychiatrist is also named Martha. She gathers jumpy people

together into little families which meet once a week. It’s a lot of fun.

She teaches us how to comfort one another intelligently. She is on

vacation now. I like her a lot.

And I think now, as my fiftieth birthday draws near, about the

American novelist Thomas Wolfe, who was only thirty-eight years old

when he died. He got a lot of help in organizing his novels from

Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons. I have heard

that Perkins told him to keep in mind as he wrote, as a unifying idea, a

hero’s search for a father.

It seems to me that really truthful American novels would have the

heroes and heroines alike looking for mothers instead. This needn’t be

embarrassing. It’s simply true.

A mother is much more useful.

I wouldn’t feel particularly good if I found another father. Neither would

Dwayne Hoover. Neither would Kilgore Trout.

And just as motherless Dwayne Hoover was berating motherless

Wayne Hoobler in the used car lot, a man who had actually killed his

mother was preparing to land in a chartered plane at Will Fairchild

Memorial Airport, on the other side of the Interstate. This was Eliot

Rosewater, Kilgore Trout’s patron. He killed his mother accidentally in

a boating accident, when a youth. She was Women’s Chess

Champion of the United States of America, nineteen hundred and

thirty-six years after the Son of God was born, supposedly. Rosewater

killed her the year after that.

It was his pilot who caused the airport’s runways to become an exconvict’s idea of fairyland. Rosewater remembered his mother’s

jewelry when the lights came on. He looked to the west, and he smiled

at the rosy loveliness of the Mildred Barry Memorial Arts Center, a

harvest moon on stilts in a bend of Sugar Creek. It reminded him of

how his mother had looked when he saw her through the bleary eyes

of infancy.

I had made him up, of course—and his pilot, too. I put Colonel

Looseleaf Harper, the man who had dropped an atomic bomb on

Nagasaki, Japan, at the controls.

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I made Rosewater an alcoholic in another book. I now had him

reasonably well sobered up, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. I

had him use his new-found sobriety, to explore, among other things,

the supposed spiritual and physical benefits of sexual orgies with

strangers in New York City. He was only confused so far.

I could have killed him, and his pilot, too, but I let them live on. So their

plane touched down uneventfully.

The two physicians on the disaster vehicle named Martha were

Cyprian Ukwende, of Nigeria, and Khashdrahr Miasma, from the infant

nation of Bangladesh. Both were parts of the world which were

famous from time to time for having the food run out. Both places were

specifically mentioned, in fact, in Now It Can Be Told, by Kilgore Trout.

Dwayne Hoover read in that book that robots all over the world were

constantly running out of fuel and dropping dead, while waiting around

to test the only free-willed creature in the Universe, on the off-chance

that he should appear.

At the wheel of the ambulance was Eddie Key, a young black man

who was a direct descendant of Francis Scott Key, the white American

patriot who wrote the National Anthem. Eddie knew he was

descended from Key. He could name more than six hundred of his

ancestors, and had at least an anecdote about each. They were

Africans, Indians and white men.

He knew, for instance, that his mother’s side of the family had once

owned the farm on which Sacred Miracle Cave was discovered, that

his ancestors had called it “Bluebird Farm.”

Here was why there were so many young foreign doctors on the

hospital staff, incidentally: The country didn’t produce nearly enough

doctors for all the sick people it had, but it had an awful lot of

money. So it bought doctors from other countries which didn’t have

much money.

Eddie Key knew so much about his ancestry because the black part of

his family had done what so many African families still do in Africa,

which was to have one member of each generation whose duty it was

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to memorize the history of the family so far. Eddie Key had begun to

store in his mind the names and adventures of ancestors on both his

mother’s and father’s sides of his family when he was only six years

old. As he sat in the front of the disaster vehicle, looking out through

the windshield, he had the feeling that he himself was a vehicle, and

that his eyes were windshields through which his progenitors could

look, if they wished to.

Francis Scott Key was only one of thousands back there. On the offchance that Key might now be having a look at what had become of

the United States of America so far, Eddie focussed his eyes on an

American flag which was stuck to the windshield. He said this very

quietly: “Still wavin’, man.”

Eddie Key’s familiarity with a teeming past made life much more

interesting to him than it was to Dwayne, for instance, or to me, or to

Kilgore Trout, or to almost any white person in Midland City that day.

We had no sense of anybody else using our eyes—or our hands. We

didn’t even know who our great-grandfathers and greatgrandmothers were. Eddie Key was afloat in a river of people who

were flowing from here to there in time. Dwayne and Trout and I

were pebbles at rest.

And Eddie Key, because he knew so much by heart, was able to

have deep, nourishing feelings about Dwayne Hoover, for instance,

and about Dr. Cyprian Ukwende, too. Dwayne was a man whose

family had taken over Bluebird Farm. Ukwende, an Indaro, was

a man whose ancestors had kidnapped an ancestor of Key’s on

the West Coast of Africa, a man named Ojumwa. The Indaros

sold him for a musket to British slave traders, who took him on a

sailing ship named the “Skylark” to Charleston, South Carolina,

where he was auctioned off as a self-propelled, self-repairing

farm machine.

And so on.

Dwayne Hoover was now hustled aboard Martha through big double

doors in her rear, just ahead of the engine compartment. Eddie Key

was in the driver’s seat, and he watched the action in his rearview

mirror. Dwayne was swaddled so tightly in canvas restraining sheets

that his reflection looked to Eddie like a bandaged thumb.

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Dwayne didn’t notice the restraints. He thought he was on the virgin

planet promised by the book by Kilgore Trout. Even when he was

laid out horizontally by Cyprian Ukwende and Khashdrahr Miasma,

he thought he was standing up. The book had told him that he went

swimming in cold water on the virgin planet, that he always yelled

something surprising when he climbed out of the icy pool. It was a

game. The Creator of the Universe would try to guess what Dwayne

would yell each day. And Dwayne would fool him totally.

Here is what Dwayne yelled in the ambulance: “Goodbye, Blue

Monday!” Then it seemed to him that another day had passed on the

virgin planet, and it was time to yell again. “Not a cough in a carload!”

he yelled.

Kilgore Trout was one of the walking wounded. He was able to climb

aboard Martha without assistance, and to choose a place to sit where

he would be away from real emergencies. He had jumped Dwayne

Hoover from behind when Dwayne dragged Francine Pefko out of

Dwayne’s showroom and onto the asphalt. Dwayne wanted to give

her a beating in public, which his bad chemicals made him think she

richly deserved.

Dwayne had already broken her jaw and three ribs in the office. When

he trundled her outside, there was a fairsize crowd which had drifted

out of the cocktail lounge and the kitchen of the new Holiday Inn. “Best

fucking machine in the State,” he told the crowd. “Wind her up, and

she’ll fuck you and say she loves you, and she won’t shut up till you

give her a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.”

And so on. Trout grabbed him from behind.

Trout’s right ring finger somehow slipped into Dwayne’s mouth, and

Dwayne bit off the topmost joint. Dwayne let go of Francine after that,

and she slumped to the asphalt. She was unconscious, and the most

seriously injured of all. And Dwayne went cantering over to the

concrete trough by the Interstate, and he spat Kilgore Trout’s fingertip

into Sugar Creek.

Kilgore Trout did not choose to lie down in Martha. He settled into a

leather bucket seat behind Eddie Key. Key asked him what was the

matter with him, and Trout held up his right hand, partly shrouded in a

bloody handkerchief, which looked like this:

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“A slip of the lip can sink a ship!” yelled Dwayne.

“Remember Pearl Harbor!” yelled Dwayne. Most of what he had done

during the past three-quarters of an hour had been hideously unjust.

But he had spared Wayne Hoobler, at least. Wayne was back among

the used cars again, unscathed. He was picking up a bracelet which I

had pitched back there for him to find.

As for myself: I kept a respectful distance between myself and all the

violence—even though I had created Dwayne and his violence and

the city, and the sky above and the Earth below. Even so, I came out

of the riot with a broken watch crystal and what turned out later to be a

broken toe. Somebody jumped backwards to get out of Dwayne’s way.

He broke my watch crystal, even though I had created him, and he

broke my toe.

This isn’t the kind of book where people get what is coming to them at

the end. Dwayne hurt only one person who deserved to be hurt for

being so wicked: That was Don Breedlove. Breedlove was the white

gas-conversion unit installer who had raped Patty Keene, the waitress

in Dwayne’s Burger Chef out on Crestview Avenue, in the parking lot

of George Hickman Bannister Memorial Fieldhouse out at the County

Fairgrounds after Peanut University beat Innocent Bystander High

School in the Regional Class High School Basketball Playoffs.

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Don Breedlove was in the kitchen of the Inn when Dwayne began his

rampage. He was repairing a defective gas oven in there.

He stepped outside for some fresh air, and Dwayne came running up

to him. Dwayne had just spit Kilgore Trout’s fingertip into Sugar Creek.

Don and Dwayne knew each other quite well, since Dwayne had once

sold Breedlove a new Pontiac Ventura, which Don said was a lemon.

A lemon was an automobile which didn’t run right, and which nobody

was able to repair.

Dwayne actually lost money on the transaction, making adjustments

and replacing parts in an attempt to mollify Breedlove. But Breedlove

was inconsolable, and he finally painted this sign in bright yellow on

his trunk lid and on both doors:

Here was what was really wrong with the car, incidentally. The child

of a neighbor of Breedlove had put maple sugar in the gas tank of

the Ventura. Maple sugar was a kind of candy made from the blood

of trees.

So Dwayne Hoover now extended his right hand to Breedlove, and

Breedlove without thinking anything about it took that hand in his own.

They linked up like this:

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This was a symbol of friendship between men. The feeling was, too,

that a lot of character could be read into the way a man shook hands.

Dwayne and Don Breedlove gave each other squeezes which were

dry and hard.

So Dwayne held on to Don Breedlove with his right hand, and he

smiled as though bygones were bygones. Then he made a cup out of

his left hand, and he hit Don on the ear with the open end of the cup.

This created terrific air pressure in Don’s ear. He fell down because

the pain was so awful. Don would never hear anything with that ear,

ever again.

So Don was in the ambulance, too, now—sitting up like Kilgore Trout.

Francine was lying down—unconscious but moaning. Beatrice

Keedsler was lying down, although she might have sat up. Her jaw

was broken. Bunny Hoover was lying down. His face was

unrecognizable, even as a face—anybody’s face. He had been given

morphine by Cyprian Ukwende.

There were five other victims as well—one white female, two white

males, two black males. The three white people had never been in

Midland City before. They were on their way together from Erie,

Pennsylvania, to the Grand Canyon, which was the deepest crack on

the planet. They wanted to look down into the crack, but they never

got to do it. Dwayne Hoover assaulted them as they walked from the

car toward the lobby of the New Holiday Inn.

The two black males were both kitchen employees of the Inn.

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Cyprian Ukwende now tried to remove Dwayne Hoover’s shoes—

but Dwayne’s shoes and laces and socks were impregnated with

the plastic material, which he had picked up while wading across

Sugar Creek.

Ukwende was not mystified by plasticized, unitized shoes and socks.

He saw shoes and socks like that every day at the hospital, on the feet

of children who had played too close to Sugar Creek. In fact, he had

hung a pair of tinsnips on the wall of the hospital’s emergency room—

for cutting off plasticized, unitized shoes and socks.

He turned to his Bengali assistant, young Dr. Khashdrahr Miasma.

“Get some shears,” he said.

Miasma was standing with his back to the door of the ladies’ toilet on

the emergency vehicle. He had done nothing so far to deal with all

the emergencies. Ukwende and police and a team from Civil

Defense had done the work so far. Miasma now refused even to find

some shears.

Basically, Miasma probably shouldn’t have been in the field of

medicine at all, or at least not in any area where there was a chance

that he might be criticized. He could not tolerate criticism. This was a

characteristic beyond his control. Any hint that anything about him was

not absolutely splendid automatically turned him into a useless, sulky

child who would only say that it wanted to go home.

That was what he said when Ukwende told him a second time to find

shears: “I want to go home.”

Here is what he had been criticized for, just before the alarm came in

about Dwayne’s going berserk: He had amputated a black man’s foot,

whereas the foot could probably have been saved.

And so on.

I could go on and on with the intimate details about the various lives of

people on the super-ambulance, but what good is more information?

I agree with Kilgore Trout about realistic novels and their

accumulations of nit-picking details. In Trout’s novel, The Pan-Galactic

Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and

sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch

library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then

he takes it back.

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The librarian asks him why he doesn’t like it, and he says to her, “I

already know about human beings.”

And so on.

Martha began to move. Kilgore Trout saw a sign he liked a lot. Here is

what it said:

And so on.

Dwayne Hoover’s awareness returned to Earth momentarily. He spoke

of opening a health club in Midland City, with rowing machines and

stationary bicycles and whirlpool baths and sunlamps and a swimming

pool and so on. He told Cyprian Ukwende that the thing to do with a

health club was to open it and then sell it as soon as possible for a profit.

“People get all enthusiastic about getting back in shape or losing some

pounds,” said Dwayne. “They sign up for the program, but then they lose

interest in about a year, and they stop coming. That’s how people are.”

And so on.

Dwayne wasn’t going to open any health club. He wasn’t going to

open anything ever again. The people he had injured so unjustly

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would sue him so vengefully that he would be rendered destitute. He

would become one more withered balloon of an old man on Midland

City’s Skid Row, which was the neighborhood of the once fashionable

Fairchild Hotel. He would be by no means the only drifter of whom it

could be truthfully said, “See him? Can you believe it? He doesn’t

have a doodley-squat now, but he used to be fabulously well-to-do.”

And so on.

Kilgore Trout now peeled strips and patches of plastic from his burning

shins and feet in the ambulance. He had to use his uninjured left hand.

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Epilogue

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

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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.

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“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 soigné 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

soigné 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.

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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.

I should have noticed the queer shape of the fence when I got out of

my automobile, when I did the soigné thing of lighting a cigarette. I

should have known that a character as ferocious as Kazak was not

easily cut out of a novel.

Kazak was crouching behind a pile of bronze pipe which the Maritimo

Brothers had bought cheap from a hijacker earlier that day. Kazak

meant to kill and eat me.

I turned my back to the fence, took a deep puff of my cigarette. Pall

Malls would kill me by and by. And I mooned philosophically at the

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murky battlements of the old Keedsler Mansion, on the other side of

Fairchild Boulevard.

Beatrice Keedsler had been raised in there. The most famous murders

in the city’s history had been committed there. Will Fairchild, the war

hero, and the maternal uncle of Beatrice Keedsler, appeared one

summer night in 1926 with a Springfield rifle. He shot and killed five

relatives, three servants, two policemen, and all the animals in the

Keedslers’ private zoo. Then he shot himself through his heart.

When an autopsy was performed on him, a tumor the size of a piece

of birdshot was found in his brain. This was what caused the murders.

After the Keedslers lost the mansion at the start of the Great

Depression, Fred T. Barry and his parents moved in. The old place

was filled with the sounds of British birds. It was silent property of the

city now, and there was talk of making it into a museum where

children could learn the history of Midland City—as told by

arrowheads and stuffed animals and white men’s early artifacts.

Fred T. Barry had offered to donate halfa million dollars to the

proposed museum, on one condition: that the first Robo-Magic and

the early posters which advertised it be put on display.

And he wanted the exhibit to show, too, how machines evolved just as

animals did, but with much greater speed.

I gazed at the Keedsler mansion, never dreaming that a volcanic dog

was about to erupt behind me. Kilgore Trout came nearer. I was

almost indifferent to his approach, although we had momentous things

to say to one another about my having created him.

I thought instead of my paternal grandfather, who had been the first

licensed architect in Indiana. He had designed some dream houses for

Hoosier millionaires. They were mortuaries and guitar schools and cellar

holes and parking lots now. I thought of my mother, who drove me

around Indianapolis one time during the Great Depression, to impress

me with how rich and powerful my maternal grandfather had been. She

showed me where his brewery had been, where some of his dream

houses had been. Every one of the monuments was a cellar hole.

Kilgore Trout was only half a block from his Creator now, and slowing

down. I worried him.

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I turned toward him, so that my sinus cavities, where all telepathic

messages were sent and received, were lined up symmetrically with

his. I told him this over and over telepathically: “I have good news

for you.”

Kazak sprung.

I saw Kazak out of the corner of my right eye. His eyes were

pinwheels. His teeth were white daggers. His slobber was cyanide.

His blood was nitroglycerine.

He was floating toward me like a zeppelin, hanging lazily in air.

My eyes told my mind about him.

My mind sent a message to my hypothalamus, told it to release the

hormone CRF into the short vessels connecting my hypothalamus and

my pituitary gland.

The CRF inspired my pituitary gland to dump the hormone ACTH into

my bloodstream. My pituitary had been making and storing ACTH for

just such an occasion. And nearer and nearer the zeppelin came.

And some of the ACTH in my bloodstream reached the outer shell of

my adrenal gland, which had been making and storing glucocorticoids

for emergencies. My adrenal gland added the glucocorticoids to my

bloodstream. They went all over my body, changing glycogen into

glucose. Glucose was muscle food. It would help me fight like a

wildcat or run like a deer.

And nearer and nearer the zeppelin came.

My adrenal gland gave me a shot of adrenaline, too. I turned purple as

my blood pressure skyrocketed. The adrenaline made my heart go like

a burglar alarm. It also stood my hair on end. It also caused

coagulants to pour into my bloodstream, so, in case I was wounded,

my vital juices wouldn’t drain away.

Everything my body had done so far fell within normal operating

procedures for a human machine. But my body took one defensive

measure which I am told was without precedent in medical history. It

may have happened because some wire short-circuited or some

gasket blew. At any rate, I also retracted my testicles into my

abdominal cavity, pulled them into my fuselage like the landing gear of

an airplane. And now they tell me that only surgery will bring them

down, again.

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Be that as it may, Kilgore Trout watched me from half a block away,

not knowing who I was, not knowing about Kazak and what my body

had done about Kazak so far.

Trout had had a full day already, but it wasn’t over yet. Now he saw

his Creator leap completely over an automobile.

I landed on my hands and knees in the middle of Fairchild Boulevard.

Kazak was flung back by the fence. Gravity took charge of him as it

had taken charge of me. Gravity slammed him down on concrete.

Kazak was knocked silly.

Kilgore Trout turned away. He hastened anxiously back toward the

hospital. I called out to him, but that only made him walk faster.

So I jumped into my car and chased him. I was still high as a kite on

adrenaline and coagulants and all that. I did not know yet that I had

retracted my testicles in all the excitement. I felt only vague discomfort

down there.

Trout was cantering when I came alongside. I clocked him at eleven

miles an hour, which was excellent for a man his age. He, too, was

now full of adrenaline and coagulants and glucocorticoids.

My windows were rolled down, and I called this to him: “Whoa! Whoa!

Mr. Trout! Whoa! Mr. Trout!”

It slowed him down to be called by name.

“Whoa! I’m a friend!” I said. He shuffled to a stop, leaned in panting

exhaustion against a fence surrounding an appliance warehouse

belonging to the General Electric Company. The company’s

monogram and motto hung in the night sky behind Kilgore Trout,

whose eyes were wild. The motto was this:

PROGRESS IS OUR

MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT

“Mr. Trout,” I said from the unlighted interior of the car, “you have

nothing to fear. I bring you tidings of great joy.”

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He was slow to get his breath back, so he wasn’t much of a

conversationalist at first. “Are—are you—from the—the Arts Festival?”

he said. His eyes rolled and rolled.

“I am from the Everything Festival,” I replied.

“The what?” he said.

I thought it would be a good idea to let him have a good look at me,

and so attempted to flick on the dome light. I turned on the windshield

washers instead. I turned them off again. My view of the lights of the

County Hospital was garbled by beads of water. I pulled at another

switch, and it came away in my hand. It was a cigarette lighter. So I

had no choice but to continue to speak from darkness.

“Mr. Trout,” I said, “I am a novelist, and I created you for use in my

books.”

“Pardon me?” he said.

“I’m your Creator,” I said. “You’re in the middle of a book right now—

close to the end of it, actually.”

“Um,” he said.

“Are there any questions you’d like to ask?”

“Pardon me?” he said.

“Feel free to ask anything you want—about the past, about the future,”

I said. “There’s a Nobel Prize in your future:”

“A what?” he said.

“A Nobel Prize in medicine.”

“Huh,” he said. It was a noncommittal sound.

“I’ve also arranged for you to have a reputable publisher from now on.

No more beaver books for you.”

“Um,” he said.

“If I were in your spot, I would certainly have lots of questions,” I said.

“Do you have a gun?” he said.

I laughed there in the dark, tried to turn on the light again, activated

the windshield washer again. “I don’t need a gun to control you, Mr.

Trout. All I have to do is write down something about you, and

that’s it.”

Breakfast of Champions

225

“Are you crazy?” he said.

“No,” I said. And I shattered his power to doubt me. I transported him

to the Taj Mahal and then to Venice and then to Dar es Salaam and

then to the surface of the Sun, where the flames could not consume

him—and then back to Midland City again.

The poor old man crashed to his knees. He reminded me of the way

my mother and Bunny Hoover’s mother used to act whenever

somebody tried to take their photographs.

As he cowered there, I transported him to the Bermuda of his

childhood, had him contemplate the infertile egg of a Bermuda Ern. I

took him from there to the Indianapolis of my childhood. I put him in a

circus crowd there. I had him see a man with locomotor ataxia and a

woman with a goiter as big as a zucchini.

I got out of my rented car. I did it noisily, so his ears would tell him a

lot about his Creator, even if he was unwilling to use his eyes. I

slammed the car door firmly. As I approached him from the driver’s

side of the car, I swiveled my feet some, so that my footsteps were not

only deliberate but gritty, too.

I stopped with the tips of my shoes on the rim of the narrow field of

his downcast eyes. “Mr. Trout, I love you,” I said gently. “I have

broken your mind to pieces. I want to make it whole. I want you to

feel a wholeness and inner harmony such as I have never allowed

you to feel before. I want you to raise your eyes, to look at what I

have in my hand.”

I had nothing in my hand, but such was my power over Trout that he

would see in it whatever I wished him to see. I might have shown him

a Helen of Troy, for instance, only six inches tall.

“Mr. Trout— Kilgore—” I said, “I hold in my hand a symbol of

wholeness and harmony and nourishment. It is Oriental in its

simplicity, but we are Americans, Kilgore, and not Chinamen. We

Americans require symbols which are richly colored and threedimensional and juicy. Most of all, we hunger for symbols which have

not been poisoned by great sins our nation has committed, such as

slavery and genocide and criminal neglect, or by tinhorn commercial

greed and cunning.

“Look up, Mr. Trout,” I said, and I waited patiently. “Kilgore—?”

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226

The old man looked up, and he had my father’s wasted face when my

father was a widower—when my father was an old old man.

He saw that I held an apple in my hand.

“I am approaching my fiftieth birthday, Mr. Trout,” I said. “I am

cleansing and renewing myself for the very different sorts of years to

come. Under similar spiritual conditions, Count Tolstoi freed his

serfs. Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves. I am going to set at liberty

all the literary characters who have served me so loyally during my

writing career.

“You are the only one I am telling. For the others, tonight will be a

night like any other night. Arise, Mr. Trout, you are free, you are free.”

He arose shamblingly.

I might have shaken his hand, but his right hand was injured, so our

hands remained dangling at our sides.

“Bon voyage,” I said. I disappeared.

I somersaulted lazily and pleasantly through the void, which is my

hiding place when I dematerialize. Trout’s cries to me faded as the

distance between us increased.

His voice was my father’s voice. I heard my father—and I saw my

mother in the void. My mother stayed far, far away, because she had

left me a legacy of suicide.

A small hand mirror floated by. It was a leak with a mother-of-pearl

handle and frame. I captured it easily, held it up to my own right eye,

which looked like this:

Breakfast of Champions

227

Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me in my father’s voice:

“Make me young, make me young, make me young!”

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Document Outline

Front Cover

Copyright

Contents

eForeward

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Epilogue

Back Cover