Hocus Pocus

by Kurt Vonnegut

  MAYBE I SHOULD put her on a very short list indeed: all the women I loved. That would be Marilyn, I think, and Margaret during the first 4 years or so of our marriage, before I came home with the clap. I was also very fond of Harriet Gummer, the war correspondent for The Des Moines Register, who, it turns out, bore me a son after our love affair in Manila. I think I felt what could be called love for Zuzu Johnson, whose husband was crucified. And I had a deep, thoroughly reciprocated, multidimensioned friendship with Muriel Peck, who was a bar-tender at the Black Cat Cafe the day I was fired, who later became a member of the English Department.

  End of list.

  Muriel, too, is buried next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.

  Harriet Gummer is also dead, but out in Iowa.

  Hey, girls, wait for me, wait for me.

  I DON'T EXPECT to break a world's record with the number of women I made love to, whether I loved them or not. As far as I am concerned, the record set by Georges Simenon, the French mystery writer, can stand for all time. According to his obituary in The New York Times, he copulated with 3 different women a day for years and years.

  MARILYN SHAW AND I hadn't known each other in Vietnam, but we had a friend in common there, Sam Wakefield. Afterward, he had hired both of us for Tarkington, and then committed suicide for reasons unclear even to himself, judging from the plagiarized note he left on his bedside table.

  He and his wife, who would become Tarkington's Dean of Women, were sleeping in separate rooms by then.

  SAM WAKEFIELD, IN my opinion, saved Marilyn's and my lives before he gave up on his own. If he hadn't hired both of us for Tarkington, where we both became very good teachers of the learning-disabled, I don't know what would have become of either of us. When we passed yet again like ships in the night on the Quadrangle, with me on my way to get fired, I was, incredibly, a tenured Full Professor of Physics and she was a tenured Full Professor of Life Sciences!

  When I was still a teacher here, I asked GRIOTTM, the most popular computer game at the Pahlavi Pavilion, what might have become of me after the war instead of what really happened. The way you play GRIOTTM, of course, is to tell the computer the age and race and degree of education and present situation and drug use, if any, and so on of a person. The person doesn't have to be real. The computer doesn't ask if the person is real or not. It doesn't care about anything. It especially doesn't care about hurting people's feelings. You load it up with details about a life, real or imagined, and then it spits out a story about what was likely to happen to him or her. This story is based on what has happened to real persons with the same general specifications.

  GRIOTTM won't work without certain pieces of information. If you leave out race, for instance, it flashes the words "ethnic origin" on its screen, and stops cold. If it doesn't know that, it can't go on. The same with education.

  I didn't tell GRIOTTM that I had landed a job I loved here. I told it only about my life up to the end of the Vietnam War. It knew all about the Vietnam War and the sorts of veterans it had produced. It made me a burned-out case, on the basis of my length of service over there, I think. It had me becoming a wife-beater and an alcoholic, and winding up all alone on Skid Row.

  IF I HAD access to GRIOTTM now, I might ask it what might have happened to Marilyn Shaw if Sam Wakefield hadn't rescued her. But the escaped convicts smashed up the one in the Pavilion soon after I showed them how to work it.

  They hated it, and I didn't blame them. I was immediately sorry that I had let them know of its existence. One by one they punched in their race and age and what their parents did, if they knew, and how long they'd gone to school and what drugs they'd taken and so on, and GRIOTTM sent them straight to jail to serve long sentences.

  I HAVE NO idea how much GRIOTTM back then may have known about Vietnam nurses. The manufacturers claimed then as now that no program in stores was more than 3 months old, and so every program was right up-to-date about what had really happened to this or that sort of person at the time you bought it. The programmers, supposedly, were constantly updating GRIOTTM with the news of the day about plumbers, about podiatrists, about Vietnam boat people and Mexican wetbacks, about drug smugglers, about paraplegics, about everyone you could think of within the continental limits of the United States and Canada.

  There is some question now, I've heard, about whether GRIOTTM is as deep and up-to-date as it used to be, since Parker Brothers, the company that makes it, has been taken over by Koreans. The new owners are moving the whole operation to Indonesia, where labor costs next to nothing. They say they will keep up with American news by satellite.

  One wonders.

  I DON'T NEED any help from GRIOTTM to know that Marilyn Shaw had a much rougher war than I did. All the soldiers she had to deal with were wounded, and all of them expected of her what was more often than not impossible: that she make them whole again.

  I know that she was married, and that her husband back home divorced her and married somebody else while she was still over there, and that she didn't care. She and Sam Wakefield may have been lovers over there. I never asked.

  That seems likely. After the war he went looking for her and found her taking a course in Computer Science at New York University. She didn't want to be a nurse anymore. He told her that maybe she should try being a teacher instead. She asked him if there was a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous in Scipio, and he said there was.

  After he shot himself, Marilyn, Professor Shaw, fell off the wagon for about a week. She disappeared, and I was given the job of finding her. I discovered her downtown, drunk and asleep on a pool table in the back room of the Black Cat Cafe. She was drooling on the felt. One hand was on the cue ball, as though she meant to throw it at something when she regained consciousness.

  AS FAR AS I know, she never took another drink.

  GRIOTTM? IN THE old days anyway, before the Koreans promised to make Parker Brothers lean and mean in Indonesia, didn't come up with the same biography every time you gave it a certain set of facts. Like life itself, it offered a variety of possibilities, spitting out endings according to what the odds for winning or losing or whatever were known to be.

  After GRIOTTM put me on Skid Row 15 years ago, I had it try again. I did a little better, but not as well as I was doing here. It had me stay in the Army and become an instructor at West Point, but unhappy and bored. I lost my wife again, and still drank too much, and had a succession of woman friends who soon got sick of me and my depressions. And I died of cirrhosis of the liver a second time.

  GRIOTTM DIDN'T HAVE many alternatives to jail for the escaped convicts, though. If it came up with a parole, it soon put the ex-con back in a cage again.

  THE SAME THING happened if GRIOTTM was told that the jailbird was Hispanic. It was somewhat more optimistic about Whites, if they could read and write, and had never been in a mental hospital or been given a Dishonorable Discharge from the Armed Forces. Otherwise, they might as well be Black or Hispanic.

  THE WILD CARDS among jailbirds, as far as GRIOTTM was concerned, were Orientals and American Indians.

  WHEN THE SUPREME Court handed down its decision that prisoners should be segregated according to race, many jurisdictions did not have enough Oriental or American Indian criminals to make separate institutions for them economically feasible. Hawaii, for example, had only 2 American Indian prisoners, and Wyoming, my wife's home state, had only 1 Oriental.

  Under such circumstances, said the Court, Indians and/or Orientals should be made honorary Whites, and treated accordingly.

  This state has plenty of both, however, particularly after Indians began to make tax-free fortunes smuggling drugs over unmapped trails across the border from Canada. So the Indians had a prison all their own at what their ancestors used to call "Thunder Beaver," what we call "Niagara Falls." The Orientals have their own prison at Deer Park, Long Island, conveniently located only 50 kilometers from their heroin-processing plants in New York City's Chinatow
n.

  WHEN YOU DARE to think about how huge the illegal drug business is in this country, you have to suspect that practically everybody has a steady buzz on, just as I did during my last 2 years in high school, and just as General Grant did during the Civil War, and just as Winston Churchill did during World War II.

  SO MARILYN SHAW and I passed yet again like ships in the night on the Quadrangle. It would be our last encounter there. Without either of us knowing that it would be the last time, she said something that in retrospect is quite moving to me. What she said was derived from our exploratory conversation at the cocktail party that had welcomed us to the faculty so long ago.

  I had told her about how I met Sam Wakefield at the Cleveland Science Fair, and what the first words were that he ever spoke to me. Now, as I hastened to my doom, she played back those words to me: "What's the hurry, Son?"

  13

  THE CHAIRMAN OF the Board of Trustees that fired me 10 years ago was Robert W. Moellenkamp of West Palm Beach, himself a graduate of Tarkington and the father of 2 Tarkingtonians, 1 of whom had been my student. As it happened, he was on the verge of losing his fortune, which was nothing but paper, in Microsecond Arbitrage, Incorporated. That swindle claimed to be snapping up bargains in food and shelter and clothing and fuel and medicine and raw materials and machinery and so on before people who really needed them could learn of their existence. And then the company's computers, supposedly, would get the people who really needed whatever it was to bid against each other, running profits right through the roof. It was able to do this with its clients' money, supposedly, because its computers were linked by satellites to marketplaces in every corner of the world.

  The computers, it would turn out, weren't connected to anything but each other and their credulous clients like Tarkington's Board Chairman. He was high as a kite on printouts describing brilliant trades he had made in places like Tierra del Fuego and Uganda and God knows where else, when he agreed with the Panjandrum of American Conservatism, Jason Wilder, that it was time to fire me. Microsecond Arbitrage was his angel dust, his LSD, his heroin, his jug of Thunderbird wine, his cocaine.

  I MYSELF HAVE been addicted to older women and housekeeping, which my court-appointed lawyer tells me might be germs we could make grow into a credible plea of insanity. The most amazing thing to him was that I had never masturbated.

  "Why not?" he said.

  "My mother's father made me promise never to do it, because it would make me lazy and crazy," I said.

  "And you believed him?" he said. He is only 23 years old, fresh out of Syracuse.

  And I said, "Counselor, in these fast-moving times, with progress gone hog-wild, grandfathers are bound to be wrong about everything."

  ROBERT W. MOELLENKAMP hadn't heard yet that he and his wife and kids were as broke as any convict in Athena. So when I came into the Board Room back in 1991, he addressed me in the statesmanlike tones of a prudent conservator of a noble legacy. He nodded in the direction of Jason Wilder, who was then simply a Tarkington parent, not a member of the Board. Wilder sat at the opposite end of the great oval table with a manila folder, a tape recorder and cassettes, and a Polaroid photograph deployed before him.

  I knew who he was, of course, and something of how his mind worked, having read his newspaper column and watched his television show from time to time. But we had not met before. The Board members on either side of him had crowded into one another in order to give him plenty of room for some kind of performance.

  He was the only celebrity there. He was probably the only true celebrity ever to set foot in that Board Room.

  There was 1 other non-Trustee present. That was the College President, Henry "Tex" Johnson, whose wife Zuzu, as I've already said, I used to make love to when he was away from home any length of time. Zuzu and I had broken up for good about a month before, but we were still on speaking terms.

  "PLEASE TAKE A seat, Gene," said Moellenkamp. "Mr. Wilder, who I guess you know is Kimberley's father, has a rather disturbing story he wants to tell to you."

  "I see," I said, a good soldier doing as he was told. I wanted to keep my job. This was my home. When the time came, I wanted to retire here and then be buried here. That was before it was clear that glaciers were headed south again, and that anybody buried here, including the gang by the stable, along with Musket Mountain itself, would eventually wind up in Pennsylvania or West Virginia. Or Maryland.

  Where else could I become a Full Professor or a college teacher of any rank, with nothing but a Bachelor of Science Degree from West Point? I couldn't even teach high school or grade school, since I had never taken any of the required courses in education. At my age, which was then 51, who would hire me for anything, and especially with a demented wife and mother-in-law in tow.

  I said to the Trustees and Jason Wilder, "I believe I know most of what the story is, ladies and gentlemen. I've just been with Kimberley, and she gave me a pretty good rehearsal for what I'd better say here.

  "When listening to her charges against me, I can only hope you did not lose sight of what you yourselves have learned about me during my 15 years of faithful service to Tarkington. This Board itself, surely, can provide all the character witnesses I could ever need. If not, bring in parents and students. Choose them at random. You know and I know that they will all speak well of me."

  I nodded respectfully in Jason Wilder's direction. "I am glad to meet you in person, sir. I read your columns and watch your TV show regularly. I find what you have to say invariably thought-provoking, and so do my wife and her mother, both of them invalids." I wanted to get that in about my 2 sick dependents, in case Wilder and a couple of new Trustees hadn't heard about them.

  Actually, I was laying it on pretty thick. Although Margaret and her mother read to each other a lot, taking turns, and usually by flashlight in a tent they'd made inside the house out of bedspreads and chairs or whatever, they never read a newspaper. They didn't like television, either, except for Sesame Street, which was supposedly for children. The only time they saw Jason Wilder on the little screen as far as I can remember, my mother-in-law started dancing to him as though he were modern music.

  When one of his guests on the show said something, she froze. Only when Wilder spoke did she start to dance again.

  I certainly wasn't going to tell him that.

  "I WANT TO say first," said Wilder, "that I am in nothing less than awe, Professor Hartke, of your magnificent record in the Vietnam War. If the American people had not lost their courage and ceased to support you, we would be living in a very different and much better world, and especially in Asia. I know, too, of your kindness and understanding toward your wife and her mother, to which I am glad to apply the same encomium your behavior earned in Vietnam, 'beyond the call of duty.' So I am sorry to have to warn you that the story I am about to tell you may not be nearly as simple or easy to refute as my daughter may have led you to expect."

  "Whatever it is, sir," I said, "let's hear it. Shoot."

  So he did. He said that several of his friends had attended Tarkington or sent their children here, so that he was favorably impressed with the institution's successes with the learning-disabled long before he entrusted his own daughter to us. An usher and a bridesmaid at his wedding, he said, had earned Associate in the Arts and Sciences Degrees in Scipio. The usher had gone on to be Ambassador to Iceland. The bridesmaid was on the Board of Directors of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

  He felt that Tarkington's highly unconventional techniques would be useful if applied to the country's notoriously beleaguered inner-city schools, and he planned to say so after he had learned more about them. The ratio of teachers to students at Tarkington, incidentally, was then 1 to 6. In inner-city schools, that ratio was then 1 to 65.

  There was a big campaign back then, I remember, to get the Japanese to buy up inner-city public schools the way they were buying up prisons and hospitals. But they were too smart. They wouldn't touch schools for unwelcome children of unwelc
ome parents with a 10-foot pole.

  HE SAID HE hoped to write a book about Tarkington called "Little Miracle on Lake Mohiga" or "Teaching the Unteachable." So he wired his daughter for sound and told her to follow the best teachers in order to record what they said and how they said it. "I wanted to learn what it was that made them good, Professor Hartke, without their knowing they were being studied," he said. "I wanted them to go on being whatever they were, warts and all, without any self-consciousness."

  This was the first I heard of the tapes. That chilling news explained Kimberley's lurking, lurking, lurking all the time. Wilder spared me the suspense, at least, of wondering what all of Kimberley's apparatus might have overheard. He punched the playback button on the recorder before him, and I heard myself telling Paul Slazinger, privately, I'd thought, that the two principal currencies of the planet were the Yen and fellatio. This was so early in the academic year that classes hadn't begun yet! This was during Freshman Orientation Week, and I had just told the incoming Class of 1994 that merchants and tradespeople in the town below preferred to be paid in Japanese Yen rather than dollars, so that the freshmen might want their parents to give them their allowances in Yen.

  I had told them, too, that they were never to go into the Black Cat Cafe, which the townspeople considered their private club. It was one place they could go and not be reminded of how dependent they were on the rich kids on the hill, but I didn't say that. Neither did I say that free-lance prostitutes were sometimes found there, and in the past had been the cause of outbreaks of venereal disease on campus.

  I had kept it simple for the freshmen: "Tarkingtonians are more than welcome anywhere in town but the Black Cat Cafe."