Cat's Cradle (13 page)

So death rattles and all sorts of spastic yodels bounced off the new buildings.

And then came words.

“You,” he said to Frank hoarsely, “you—Franklin Hoenikker—you will be the next President of San Lorenzo. Science—you have science. Science is the strongest thing there is.

“Science,” said “Papa.” “Ice.” He rolled his yellow eyes, and he passed out again.

I looked at Mona.

Her expression was unchanged.

The pilot next to her, however, had his features composed in the catatonic, orgiastic rigidity of one receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor.

I looked down and I saw what I was not meant to see.

Mona had slipped off her sandal. Her small brown foot was bare.

And with that foot, she was kneading and kneading and kneading—obscenely kneading—the instep of the flyer’s boot.

“P
APA” DIDN’T DIE
—not then.

He was rolled away in the airport’s big red meat wagon.

The Mintons were taken to their embassy by an American limousine.

Newt and Angela were taken to Frank’s house in a San Lorenzan limousine.

The Crosbys and I were taken to the Casa Mona hotel in San Lorenzo’s one taxi, a hearselike 1939 Chrysler limousine with jump seats. The name on the side of the cab was Castle Transportation Inc. The cab was owned by Philip Castle, the owner of the Casa Mona, the son of the completely unselfish man I had come to interview.

The Crosbys and I were both upset. Our consternation was expressed in questions we had to have answered at once. The Crosbys wanted to know who Bokonon was. They were scandalized by the idea that anyone should be opposed to “Papa” Monzano.

Irrelevantly, I found that I had to know at once who the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy had been.

The Crosbys got their answer first. They could not understand the San Lorenzan dialect, so I had to
translate for them. Crosby’s basic question to our driver was: “Who the hell is this pissant Bokonon, anyway?”

“Very bad man,” said the driver. What he actually said was,
“Vorry ball moan.”

“A Communist?” asked Crosby, when he heard my translation.

“Oh, sure.”

“Has he got any following?”

“Sir?”

“Does anybody think he’s any good?”

“Oh, no, sir,” said the driver piously. “Nobody that crazy.”

“Why hasn’t he been caught?” demanded Crosby.

“Hard man to find,” said the driver. “Very smart.”

“Well, people must be hiding him and giving him food or he’d be caught by now.”

“Nobody hide him; nobody feed him. Everybody too smart to do that.”

“You sure?”

“Oh, sure,” said the driver. “Anybody feed that crazy old man, anybody give him place to sleep, they get the hook. Nobody want the hook.”

He pronounced that last word:
“hy-u-o-ook-kuh.”

I
ASKED THE DRIVER
who the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy had been. The boulevard we were going down, I saw, was called the Boulevard of the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy.

The driver told me that San Lorenzo had declared war on Germany and Japan an hour after Pearl Harbor was attacked.

San Lorenzo conscripted a hundred men to fight on the side of democracy. These hundred men were put on a ship bound for the United States, where they were to be armed and trained.

The ship was sunk by a German submarine right outside of Bolivar harbor.

“Dose, sore,”
he said,
“yeeara lo hoon-yera mora-toorz tut zamoo-cratz-ya.”

“Those, sir,” he’d said in dialect, “are the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy.”

T
HE
C
ROSBYS AND I
had the curious experience of being the very first guests of a new hotel. We were the first to sign the register of the Casa Mona.

The Crosbys got to the desk ahead of me, but H. Lowe Crosby was so startled by a wholly blank register that he couldn’t bring himself to sign. He had to think about it a while.

“You sign,” he said to me. And then, defying me to think he was superstitious, he declared his wish to photograph a man who was making a huge mosaic on the fresh plaster of the lobby wall.

The mosaic was a portrait of Mona Aamons Monzano. It was twenty feet high. The man who was working on it was young and muscular. He sat at the top of a stepladder. He wore nothing but a pair of white duck trousers.

He was a white man.

The mosaicist was making the fine hairs on the nape of Mona’s swan neck out of chips of gold.

Crosby went over to photograph him; came back to report that the man was the biggest pissant he had ever met. Crosby was the color of tomato juice when
he reported this. “You can’t say a damn thing to him that he won’t turn inside out.”

So I went over to the mosaicist, watched him for a while, and then I told him, “I envy you.”

“I always knew,” he sighed, “that, if I waited long enough, somebody would come and envy me. I kept telling myself to be patient, that, sooner or later, somebody envious would come along.”

“Are you an American?”

“That happiness is mine.” He went right on working; he was incurious as to what I looked like. “Do you want to take my photograph, too?”

“Do you mind?”

“I think, therefore I am, therefore I am photographable.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have my camera with me.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake, get it! You’re not one of those people who trusts his memory, are you?”

“I don’t think I’ll forget that face you’re working on very soon.”

“You’ll forget it when you’re dead, and so will I. When I’m dead, I’m going to forget everything—and I advise you to do the same.”

“Has she been posing for this or are you working from photographs or what?”

“I’m working from or what.”

“What?”

“I’m working from or what.” He tapped his temple. “It’s all in this enviable head of mine.”

“You know her?”

“That happiness is mine.”

“Frank Hoenikker’s a lucky man.”

“Frank Hoenikker is a piece of shit.”

“You’re certainly candid.”

“I’m also rich.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“If you want an expert opinion, money doesn’t necessarily make people happy.”

“Thanks for the information. You’ve just saved me a lot of trouble. I was just about to make some money.”

“How?”

“Writing.”

“I wrote a book once.”

“What was it called?”

“San Lorenzo,”
he said,
“the Land, the History, the People.”

“Y
OU
, I
TAKE IT
,” I said to the mosaicist, “are Philip Castle, son of Julian Castle.”

“That happiness is mine.”

“I’m here to see your father.”

“Are you an aspirin salesman?”

“No.”

“Too bad. Father’s low on aspirin. How about miracle drugs? Father enjoys pulling off a miracle now and then.”

“I’m not a drug salesman. I’m a writer.”

“What makes you think a writer isn’t a drug salesman?”

“I’ll accept that. Guilty as charged.”

“Father needs some kind of book to read to people who are dying or in terrible pain. I don’t suppose you’ve written anything like that.”

“Not yet.”

“I think there’d be money in it. There’s another valuable tip for you.”

“I suppose I could overhaul the ‘Twenty-third Psalm,’ switch it around a little so nobody would realize it wasn’t original with me.”

“Bokonon tried to overhaul it,” he told me. “Bokonon found out he couldn’t change a word.”

“You know him, too?”

“That happiness is mine. He was my tutor when I was a little boy.” He gestured sentimentally at the mosaic. “He was Mona’s tutor, too.”

“Was he a good teacher?”

“Mona and I can both read and write and do simple sums,” said Castle, “if that’s what you mean.”

H
. L
OWE
C
ROSBY
came over to have another go at Castle, the pissant.

“What do you call yourself,” sneered Crosby, “a beatnik or what?”

“I call myself a Bokononist.”

“That’s against the law in this country, isn’t it?”

“I happen to have the happiness of being an American. I’ve been able to say I’m a Bokononist any time I damn please, and, so far, nobody’s bothered me at all.”

“I believe in obeying the laws of whatever country I happen to be in.”

“You are not telling me the news.”

Crosby was livid. “Screw you, Jack!”

“Screw you, Jasper,” said Castle mildly, “and screw Mother’s Day and Christmas, too.”

Crosby marched across the lobby to the desk clerk and he said, “I want to report that man over there, that pissant, that so-called artist. You’ve got a nice little country here that’s trying to attract the tourist trade and new investment in industry. The way that man talked to me, I don’t ever want to see San Lorenzo again—and any friend who asks me about San Lorenzo, I’ll tell him to keep the hell away. You may be getting a nice picture on the wall over there, but, by God, the pissant who’s making it is the most insulting, discouraging son of a bitch I ever met in my life.”

The clerk looked sick. “Sir …”

“I’m listening,” said Crosby, full of fire.

“Sir—he owns the hotel.”

H
. L
OWE
C
ROSBY
and his wife checked out of the Casa Mona. Crosby called it “The Pissant Hilton,” and he demanded quarters at the American embassy.

So I was the only guest in a one-hundred-room hotel.

My room was a pleasant one. It faced, as did all the rooms, the Boulevard of the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy, Monzano Airport, and Bolivar harbor beyond. The Casa Mona was built like a bookcase, with solid sides and back and with a front of blue-green glass. The squalor and misery of the city, being to the sides and back of the Casa Mona, were impossible to see.

My room was air-conditioned. It was almost chilly. And, coming from the Hamming heat into that chilliness, I sneezed.

There were fresh flowers on my bedside table, but my bed had not yet been made. There wasn’t even a pillow on the bed. There was simply a bare, brand-new Beautyrest mattress. And there weren’t any coat hangers in the closet; and there wasn’t any toilet paper in the bathroom.

So I went out in the corridor to see if there
was a chambermaid who would equip me a little more completely. There wasn’t anybody out there, but there was a door open at the far end and very faint sounds of life.

I went to this door and found a large suite paved with dropcloths. It was being painted, but the two painters weren’t painting when I appeared. They were sitting on a shelf that ran the width of the window wall.

They had their shoes off. They had their eyes closed. They were facing each other.

They were pressing the soles of their bare feet together.

Each grasped his own ankles, giving himself the rigidity of a triangle.

I cleared my throat.

The two rolled off the shelf and fell to the spattered dropcloth. They landed on their hands and knees, and they stayed in that position—their behinds in the air, their noses close to the ground.

They were expecting to be killed.

“Excuse me,” I said, amazed.

“Don’t tell,” begged one querulously. “Please— please don’t tell.”

“Tell what?”

“What you saw!”

“I didn’t see anything.”

“If you tell,” he said, and he put his cheek to the floor and looked up at me beseechingly, “if you tell, we’ll die on the
hy-u-o-ook-kuh!”

“Look, friends,” I said, “either I came in too early or too late, but, I tell you again, I didn’t see anything worth mentioning to anybody. Please—get up.”

They got up, their eyes still on me. They trembled and cowered. I convinced them at last that I would never tell what I had seen.

What I had seen, of course, was the Bokononist ritual of
boko-maru
, or the mingling of awarenesses.

We Bokononists believe that it is impossible to be sole-to-sole with another person without loving the person, provided the feet of both persons are clean and nicely tended.

The basis for the foot ceremony is this “Calypso”:

W
HEN
I
GOT BACK
to my room I found that Philip Castle—mosaicist, historian, self-indexer, pissant, and hotel-keeper—was installing a roll of toilet paper in my bathroom.

“Thank you very much,” I said.

“You’re entirely welcome.”

“This is what I’d call a hotel with a real heart. How many hotel owners would take such a direct interest in the comfort of a guest?”

“How many hotel owners have just one guest?”

“You used to have three.”

“Those were the days.”

“You know, I may be speaking out of turn, but I find it hard to understand how a person of your interests and talents would be attracted to the hotel business.”

He frowned perplexedly. “I don’t seem to be as good with guests as I might, do I?”

“I knew some people in the Hotel School at Cornell, and I can’t help feeling they would have treated the Crosbys somewhat differently.”

He nodded uncomfortably. “I know. I know.” He flapped his arms. “Damned if I know why I built
this hotel—something to do with my life, I guess. A way to be busy, a way not to be lonesome.” He shook his head. “It was be a hermit or open a hotel—with nothing in between.”

“Weren’t you raised at your father’s hospital?”

“That’s right. Mona and I both grew up there.”

“Well, aren’t you at all tempted to do with your life what your father’s done with his?”