It was news to them both that they were carrying such jugs. They were shocked to find them in their hands.
They were spared making an explanation by more banging outside. I was bound to find out what the banging was right away; and, with a brazenness as unjustified as my earlier panic, I investigated, found Frank Hoenikker outside tinkering with a motor-generator set mounted on a truck.
The generator was the new source of our electricity. The gasoline motor that drove it was backfiring and smoking. Frank was trying to fix it.
He had the heavenly Mona with him. She was watching him, as always, gravely.
“Boy, have I got news for you!” he yelled at me, and he led the way back into the house.
Angela and Newt were still in the living room, but, somehow, somewhere, they had managed to get rid of their peculiar Thermos jugs.
The contents of those jugs, of course, were parts of the legacies from Dr. Felix Hoenikker, were parts of the wampeter of my karass, were chips of ice-nine.
Frank took me aside. “How awake are you?”
“As awake as I ever was.”
“I hope you’re really wide awake, because we’ve got to have a talk right now.”
“Start talking.”
“Let’s get some privacy.” Frank told Mona to make herself comfortable. “We’ll call you if we need you.”
I looked at Mona, meltingly, and I thought that I had never needed anyone as much as I needed her.
87
THE CUT OF MY JIB
ABOUT THIS FRANKLIN HOENIKKER—the pinch-faced child spoke with the timbre and conviction of a kazoo. I had heard it said in the Army that such and such a man spoke like a man with a paper rectum. Such a man was General Hoenikker. Poor Frank had had almost no experience in talking to anyone, having spent a furtive childhood as Secret Agent X-9.
Now, hoping to be hearty and persuasive, he said tinny things to me, things like, “I like the cut of your jib!” and “I want to talk cold turkey to you, man to man!”
And he took me down to what he called his “den” in order that we might, “… call a spade a spade, and let the chips fall where they may.”
So we went down steps cut into a cliff and into a natural cave that was beneath and behind the waterfall. There were a couple of drawing tables down there; three pale, bare-boned Scandinavian chairs; a bookcase containing books on architecture, books in German, French, Finnish, Italian, English.
All was lit by electric lights, lights that pulsed with the panting of the motor-generator set.
And the most striking thing about the cave was that there were pictures painted on the walls, painted with kindergarten boldness, painted with the flat clay, earth, and charcoal colors of very early man. I did not have to ask Frank how old the cave paintings were. I was able to date them by their subject. The paintings were not of mammoths or saber-toothed tigers or ithyphallic cave bears.
The paintings treated endlessly the aspects of Mona Aamons Monzano as a little girl.
“This—this is where Mona’s father worked?” I asked.
“That’s right. He was the Finn who designed the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle.”
“I know.”
“That isn’t what I brought you down here to talk about.”
“This is something about your father?”
“This is about you.” Frank put his hand on my shoulder and he looked me in the eye. The effect was dismaying. Frank meant to inspire camaraderie, but his head looked to me like a bizarre little owl, blinded by light and perched on a tall white post.
“Maybe you’d better come to the point.”
“There’s no sense in beating around the bush,” he said. “I’m a pretty good judge of character, if I do say so myself, and I like the cut of your jib.”
“Thank you.”
“I think you and I could really hit it off.”
“I have no doubt of it.”
“We’ve both got things that mesh.”
I was grateful when he took his hand from my shoulder. He meshed the fingers of his hands like gear teeth. One hand represented him, I suppose, and the other represented me.
“We need each other.” He wiggled his fingers to show me how gears worked.
I was silent for some time, though outwardly friendly.
“Do you get my meaning?” asked Frank at last.
“You and I—we’re going to do something together?”
“That’s right!” Frank clapped his hands. “You’re a worldly person, used to meeting the public; and I’m a technical person, used to working behind the scenes, making things go.”
“How can you possibly know what kind of a person I am? We’ve just met.”
“Your clothes, the way you talk.” He put his hand on my shoulder again. “I like the cut of your jib!”
“So you said.”
Frank was frantic for me to complete his thought, to do it enthusiastically, but I was still at sea. “Am I to understand that … that you are offering me some kind of job here, here in San Lorenzo?”
He clapped his hands. He was delighted. “That’s right! What would you say to a hundred thousand dollars a year?”
“Good God!” I cried. “What would I have to do for that?”
“Practically nothing. And you’d drink out of gold goblets every night and eat off of gold plates and have a palace all your own.”
“What’s the job?”
“President of the Republic of San Lorenzo.”
88
WHY FRANK COULDN’T BE PRESIDENT
“ME? PRESIDENT?” I gasped.
“Who else is there?”
“Nuts!”
“Don’t say no until you’ve really thought about it.” Frank watched me anxiously.
“No!”
“You haven’t really thought about it.”
“Enough to know it’s crazy.”
Frank made his fingers into gears again. “We’d work together. I’d be backing you up all the time.”
“Good. So, if I got plugged from the front you’d get it, too.”
“Plugged?”
“Shot! Assassinated!”
Frank was mystified. “Why would anybody shoot you?”
“So he could get to be President.”
Frank shook his head. “Nobody in San Lorenzo wants to be President,” he promised me. “It’s against their religion.”
“It’s against your religion, too? I thought you were going to be the next President.”
“I …” he said, and found it hard to go on. He looked haunted.
“You what?” I asked.
He faced the sheet of water that curtained the cave. “Maturity, the way I understand it,” he told me, “is knowing what your limitations are.”
He wasn’t far from Bokonon in defining maturity. “Maturity,” Bokonon tells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”
“I know I’ve got limitations,” Frank continued. “They’re the same limitations my father had.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve got a lot of very good ideas, just the way my father did,” Frank told me and the waterfall, “but he was no good at facing the public, and neither am I.”
89
DUFFLE
“YOU’LL TAKE THE JOB?” Frank inquired anxiously.
“No,” I told him.
“Do you know anybody who might want the job?” Frank was giving a classic illustration of what Bokonon calls duffle. Duffle, in the Bokononist sense, is the destiny of thousands upon thousands of persons when placed in the hands of a stuppa. A stuppa is a fogbound child.
I laughed.
“Something’s funny?”
“Pay no attention when I laugh,” I begged him. “I’m a notorious pervert in that respect.”
“Are you laughing at me?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Word of honor?”
“Word of honor.”
; “People used to make fun of me all the time.”
“You must have imagined that.”
“They used to yell things at me. I didn’t imagine that.”
“People are unkind sometimes without meaning to be,” I suggested. I wouldn’t have given him my word of honor on that.
“You know what they used to yell at me?”
“No.”
“They used to yell at me, ‘Hey, X-9, where you going?’”
“That doesn’t seem too bad.”
“That’s what they used to call me,” said Frank in sulky reminiscence, “ ‘Secret Agent X-9.’”
I didn’t tell him I knew that already.
“ ‘Where are you going, X-9?’” Frank echoed again.
I imagined what the taunters had been like, imagined where Fate had eventually goosed and chivvied them to. The wits who had yelled at Frank were surely nicely settled in deathlike jobs at General Forge and Foundry, at Ilium Power and Light, at the Telephone Company….
And here, by God, was Secret Agent X-9, a Major General, offering to make me king … in a cave that was curtained by a tropical waterfall.
“They really would have been surprised if I’d stopped and told them where I was going.”
“You mean you had some premonition you’d end up here?” It was a Bokononist question.
“I was going to Jack’s Hobby Shop,” he said, with no sense of anticlimax.
“Oh.”
“They all knew I was going there, but they didn’t know what really went on there. They would have been really surprised—especially the girls—if they’d found out what really went on. The girls didn’t think I knew anything about girls.”
“What really went on?”
“I was screwing Jack’s wife every day. That’s how come I fell asleep all the time in high school. That’s how come I never achieved my full potential.”
He roused himself from this sordid recollection. “Come on. Be President of San Lorenzo. You’d be real good at it, with your personality. Please?”
90
ONLY ONE CATCH
AND THE TIME OF NIGHT and the cave and the waterfall—and the stone angel in Ilium….
And 250,000 cigarettes and 3,000 quarts of booze, and two wives and no wife….
And no love waiting for me anywhere….
And the listless life of an ink-stained hack….
And Pabu, the moon, and Borasisi, the sun, and their children….
All things conspired to form one cosmic vin-dit, one mighty shove into Bokononism, into the belief that God was running my life and that He had work for me to do.
And, inwardly, I sarooned, which is to say that I acquiesced to the seeming demands of my vin-dit.
Inwardly, I agreed to become the next President of San Lorenzo.
Outwardly, I was still guarded, suspicious. “There must be a catch,” I hedged.
“There isn’t.”
“There’ll be an election?”
“There never has been. We’ll just announce who the new President is.”
“And nobody will object?”
“Nobody objects to anything. They aren’t interested. They don’t care.”
“There has to be a catch!”
“There’s kind of one,” Frank admitted.
“I knew it!” I began to shrink from my vin-dit. “What is it? What’s the catch?”
“Well, it isn’t really a catch, because you don’t have to do it, if you don’t want to. It would be a good idea, though.”
“Let’s hear this great idea.”
“Well, if you’re going to be President, I think you really ought to marry Mona. But you don’t have to, if you don’t want to. You’re the boss.”
“She would have me?”
“If she’d have me, she’d have you. All you have to do is ask her.”
“Why should she say yes?”
“It’s predicted in The Books of Bokonon that she’ll marry the next President of San Lorenzo,” said Frank.
91
MONA
FRANK BROUGHT MONA to her father’s cave and left us alone.
We had difficulty in speaking at first. I was shy.
Her gown was diaphanous. Her gown was azure. It was a simple gown, caught lightly at the waist by a gossamer thread. All else was shaped by Mona herself Her breasts were like pomegranates or what you will, but like nothing so much as a young woman’s breasts.
Her feet were all but bare. Her toenails were exquisitely manicured. Her scanty sandals were gold.
“How—how do you do?” I asked. My heart was pounding. Blood boiled in my ears.
“It is not possible to make a mistake,” she assured me.
I did not know that this was a customary greeting given by all Bokononists when meeting a shy person. So, I responded with a feverish discussion of whether it was possible to make a mistake or not.
“My God, you have no idea how many mistakes I’ve already made. You’re looking at the world’s champion mistakemaker,” I blurted—and so on. “Do you have any idea what Frank just said to me?”
“About me?”
“About everything, but especially about you.”
“He told you that you could have me, if you wanted.”
“Yes.”
“That’s true.”
“I—I—I …”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know what to say next.”
“Boko-maru would help,” she suggested.
“What?”
“Take off your shoes,” she commanded. And she removed her sandals with the utmost grace.
I am a man of the world, having had, by a reckoning I once made, more than fifty-three women. I can say that I have seen women undress themselves in every way that it can be done. I have watched the curtains part on every variation of the final act.
And yet, the one woman who made me groan involuntarily did no more than remove her sandals.
I tried to untie my shoes. No bridegroom ever did worse. I got one shoe off, but knotted the other one tight. I tore a thumbnail on the knot; finally ripped off the shoe without untying it.
Then off came my socks.
Mona was already sitting on the floor, her legs extended, her round arms thrust behind her for support, her head tilted back, her eyes closed.
It was up to me now to complete my first—my first—my first, Great God …
Boko-maru.
92
ON THE POET’S CELEBRATION OF HIS FIRST BOKO-MARU
THESE ARE NOT Bokonon’s words. They are mine.
Sweet wraith,
Invisible mist of …
I am—
My soul—
Wraith lovesick o’erlong,
O’erlong alone:
Wouldst another sweet soul meet?
Long have I
Advised thee ill
As to where two souls
Might tryst.
My soles, my soles!
My soul, my soul,
Go there,
Sweet soul;
Be kissed.
Mmmmmmm.
93
HOW I ALMOST LOST MY MOMA
“DO YOU FIND IT EASIER to talk to me now?” Mona inquired.
“As though I’d known you for a thousand years,” I confessed. I felt like crying. “I love you, Mona.”
“I love you.” She said it simply.
“What a fool Frank was!”
“Oh?”
“To give you up.”
“He did not love me. He was going to marry me only because ‘Papa’ wanted him to. He loves another.”
“Who?”
“A woman he knew in Ilium.”
The lucky woman had to be the wife of the owner of Jack’s Hobby Shop. “He told you?”
“Tonight, when he freed me to marry you.”
“Mona?”
“Yes?”
“Is—is there anyone else in your life?”
She was puzzled. “Many,” she s
aid at last.
“That you love?”
“I love everyone.”
“As—as much as me?”
“Yes.” She seemed to have no idea that this might bother me.
I got off the floor, sat in a chair, and started putting my shoes and socks back on.
“I suppose you—you perform—you do what we just did with—with other people?”
“Boko-maru?”
“Boko-maru.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t want you to do it with anybody but me from now on,” I declared.
Tears filled her eyes. She adored her promiscuity; was angered that I should try to make her feel shame. “I make people happy. Love is good, not bad.”
“As your husband, I’ll want all your love for myself.”
She stared at me with widening eyes. “A sin-wat!”
“What was that?”
“A sin-wat!” she cried. “A man who wants all of somebody’s love. That’s very bad.”
“In the case of marriage, I think it’s a very good thing. It’s the only thing.”
She was still on the floor, and I, now with my shoes and socks back on, was standing. I felt very tall, though I’m not very tall; and I felt very strong, though I’m not very strong; and I was a respectful stranger to my own voice. My voice had a metallic authority that was new.
As I went on talking in ball-peen tones, it dawned on me what was happening, what was happening already. I was already starting to rule.
I told Mona that I had seen her performing a sort of vertical boko-maru with a pilot on the reviewing stand shortly after my arrival. “You are to have nothing more to do with him,” I told her. “What is his name?”
“I don’t even know,” she whispered. She was looking down now.
“And what about young Philip Castle?”
“You mean boko-maru?”
“I mean anything and everything. As I understand it, you two grew up together.”
“Yes.”
“Bokonon tutored you both?”
“Yes.” The recollection made her radiant again.
“I suppose there was plenty of boko-maruing in those days.”
“Oh, yes!” she said happily.
Cat's Cradle: A Novel Page 13
