Slapstick or Lonesome No More!

by Kurt Vonnegut

  *

  The People's Republic of China was at that very moment secretly creating literally millions upon millions of geniuses--by teaching pairs or small groups of congenial, telepathically compatible specialists to think as single minds. And those patchwork minds were the equals of Sir Isaac Newtown's or William Shakespeare's, say.

  Oh, yes--and long before I became President of the United States of America, the Chinese had begun to combine those synthetic minds into intellects so flabbergasting that the Universe itself seemed to be saying to them, "I await your instructions. You can be anything you want to be. I will be anything you want me to be."

  Hi ho.

  *

  I learned about this Chinese scheme long after Eliza died, and long after I lost all my authority as President of the United States of America. There was nothing I could do with such knowledge by then.

  One thing amused me, though: I was told that poor old Western Civilization had provided the Chinese the inspiration to put together such synthetic geniuses. The Chinese got the idea from the American and European scientists who put their heads together during the Second World War, with the single-minded intention of creating an atomic bomb.

  Hi ho.

  17

  OUR POOR PARENTS had first believed that we were idiots. They had tried to adapt to that. Then they believed that we were geniuses. They had tried to adapt to that. Now they were told that we were dull normals, and they were trying to adapt to that.

  As Eliza and I watched through peepholes, they made a pitiful and fog-bound plea for help. They asked Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner how they were to harmonize our dullness with the fact that we could converse so learnedly on so many subjects in so many languages.

  Dr. Cordiner was razor-keen to enlighten them on just this point. "The world is full of people who are very clever at seeming much smarter than they really are," she said. "They dazzle us with facts and quotations and foreign words and so on, whereas the truth is that they know almost nothing of use in life as it is really lived. My purpose is to detect such people--so that society can be protected from them, and so they can be protected from themselves.

  "Your Eliza is a perfect example," she went on. "She has lectured to me on economics and astronomy and music and every other subject you can think of, and yet she can neither read nor write, nor will she ever be able to."

  *

  She said that our case was not a sad one, since there were no big jobs we wished to hold. "They have almost no ambition at all," she said, "so life can't disappoint them. They want only that life as they have known it should go on forever, which is impossible, of course."

  Father nodded sadly. "And the boy is the smarter of the two?"

  "To the extent he can read and write," said Dr. Cordiner. "He isn't nearly as socially outgoing as his sister. When he is away from her, he becomes as silent as a tomb.

  "I suggest that he be sent to some special school, which won't be too demanding academically or too threatening socially, where he can learn to paddle his own canoe."

  "Do what?" said Father.

  Dr. Cordiner told him again. "Paddle his own canoe," she said.

  *

  Eliza and I should have kicked our way through the wall at that point--should have entered the library ragingly, in an explosion of plaster and laths.

  But we had sense enough to know that our power to eavesdrop at will was one of the few advantages we had. So we stole back to our bedrooms, and then burst into the corridor, and came running down the front stairs and across the foyer and into the library, doing something we had never done before. We were sobbing.

  We announced that, if anybody tried to part us, we would kill ourselves.

  *

  Dr. Cordiner laughed at this. She told our parents that several of the questions in her tests were designed to detect suicidal tendencies. "I absolutely guarantee you," she said, "that the last thing either one of these two would do would be to commit suicide."

  Her saying this so jovially was a tactical mistake on her part, for it caused something in Mother to snap. The atmosphere in the room became electrified as Mother stopped being a weak and polite and credulous doll.

  Mother did not say anything at first. But she had clearly become subhuman in the finest sense. She was a coiled female panther, suddenly willing to tear the throats out of any number of childrearing experts--in defense of her young.

  It was the one and only time that she would ever be irrationally committed to being the mother of Eliza and me.

  *

  Eliza and I sensed this sudden jungle alliance telepathically, I think. At any rate, I remember that the damp velvet linings of my sinus cavities were tingling with encouragement.

  We left off our crying, which we were no good at doing anyway. Yes, and we made a clear demand which could be satisfied at once. We asked to be tested for intelligence again--as a pair this time.

  "We want to show you," I said, "how glorious we are when we work together, so that nobody will ever talk about parting us again."

  We spoke carefully. I explained who "Betty and Bobby Brown" were. I agreed that they were stupid. I said we had had no experience with hating, and had had trouble understanding that particular human activity whenever we encountered it in books.

  "But we are making small beginnings in hating now," said Eliza. "Our hating is strictly limited at this point--to only two people in this Universe: To Betty and Bobby Brown."

  *

  Dr. Cordiner, as it turned out, was a coward, among other things. Like so many cowards, she chose to go on bullying at the worst possible time. She jeered at Eliza's and my request.

  "What kind of a world do you think this is?" she said, and so on.

  So Mother got up and went over to her, not touching her, and not looking her in the eyes, either. Mother spoke to her throat, and, in a tone between a purr and a growl, she called Dr. Cordiner an "overdressed little sparrow-fart."

  18

  SO ELIZA AND I were retested--as a pair this time. We sat side-by-side at the stainless steel table in the tiled diningroom.

  We were so happy!

  A depersonalized Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner administered the tests like a robot, while our parents looked on. She had furnished us with new tests, so that the challenges would all be fresh.

  Before we began, Eliza said to Mother and Father, "We promise to answer every question correctly."

  Which we did.

  *

  What were the questions like? Well, I was poking around the ruins of a school on Forty-sixth Street yesterday, and I was lucky enough to find a whole batch of intelligence tests, all set to go.

  I quote: "A man purchased 100 shares of stock at five dollars a share. If each share rose ten cents the first month, decreased eight cents the second month, and gained three cents the third month, what was the value of the man's investment at the end of the third month?"

  Or try this:

  "How many digits are there to the left of the decimal place in the square root of 692038.42753?"

  Or this:

  "A yellow tulip viewed through a piece of blue glass looks what color?"

  Or this:

  "Why does the Little Dipper appear to turn about the North Star once a day?"

  Or this:

  "Astronomy is to geology as steeplejack is to what?"

  And so on. Hi ho.

  *

  We made good on Eliza's promise of perfection, as I have said.

  The only trouble was that the two of us, in the innocent process of checking and rechecking our answers, wound up under the table--with our legs wrapped around each others' necks in scissors grips, and snorting and snuffling into each others' crotches.

  When we regained our chairs, Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner had fainted, and our parents were gone.

  *

  At ten o'clock the next morning, I was taken by automobile to a school for severely disturbed children on Cape Cod.

  19

  IT IS SUND
OWN AGAIN. A bird down around Thirty-first Street and Fifth, where there is an Army tank with a tree growing out of its turret, calls out to me. It asks the same question over and over again with piercing clarity.

  "Whip poor Will?" it says.

  I never call that bird a "whippoorwill," and neither do Melody and Isadore, who follow my lead in naming things. They seldom call Manhattan "Manhattan," for example, or "The Island of Death," which is its common name on the mainland. They do as I do: They call it "Skyscraper National Park," without knowing what the joke is in that, or, with equal humorlessness, "Angkor Wat."

  And what they call the bird that asks about whipping when the sun goes down is what Eliza and I called it when we were children. It was a correct name which we had learned from a dictionary.

  We treasured the name for the superstitious dread it inspired. The bird became a nightmare creature in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch when we spoke its name. And, whenever we heard its cry, we spoke its name simultaneously. It was almost the only occasion on which we would speak simultaneously.

  "The cry of The Nocturnal Goatsucker," we would say.

  *

  And now I hear Melody and Isadore saying that, too, in a part of the lobby where I cannot see them. "The cry of the Nocturnal Goatsucker," they say.

  *

  Eliza and I listened to that bird one evening before my departure for Cape Cod.

  We had fled the mansion for the privacy of the dank mausoleum of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.

  "Whip poor Will?" came the question, from somewhere out under the apple trees.

  *

  Even when we put our heads together, we could think of little to say.

  I have heard that condemned prisoners often think of themselves as dead people, long before they die. Perhaps that was how our genius felt, knowing that a cruel axeman, so to speak, was about to split it into two nondescript chunks of meat, into Betty and Bobby Brown.

  Be that as it may, our hands were busy--which is often the case with the hands of dying people. We had brought what we thought were the best of our writings with us. We rolled them into a cylinder, which we hid in an empty bronze funerary urn.

  The urn had been intended for the ashes of the wife of Professor Swain, who had chosen to be buried here in New York, instead. It was encrusted with verdigris.

  Hi ho.

  *

  What was on the papers?

  A method for squaring circles, I remember--and a Utopian scheme for creating artificial extended families in America by issuing everyone a new middle name. All persons with the same middle name would be relatives.

  Yes, and there was our critique of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and an essay on the nature of gravity, which concluded that gravity had surely been a variable in ancient times.

  There was a paper, I remember, which argued that teeth should be washed with hot water, just like dishes and pots and pans.

  And so on.

  *

  It was Eliza who had thought of hiding the papers in the urn.

  It was Eliza who now put the lid in place.

  We were not close together when she did it, so what she said was her own invention: "Say goodbye forever to your intelligence, Bobby Brown."

  "Goodbye," I said.

  *

  "Eliza--" I said, "so many of the books I've read to you said that love was the most important thing of all. Maybe I should tell you that I love you now."

  "Go ahead," she said.

  "I love you, Eliza," I said.

  She thought about it. "No," she said at last, "I don't like it."

  "Why not?" I said.

  "It's as though you were pointing a gun at my head," she said. "It's just a way of getting somebody to say something they probably don't mean. What else can I say, or anybody say, but, 'I love you, too'?"

  "You don't love me?" I said.

  "What could anybody love about Bobby Brown?" she said.

  *

  Somewhere outside, out under the apple trees, the Nocturnal Goatsucker asked his question again.

  20

  ELIZA DID NOT come down to breakfast the next morning. She remained in her room until I was gone.

  Our parents came along with me in their chauffeur-driven Mercedes limousine. I was their child with a future. I could read and write.

  And, even as we rolled through the lovely country-side, my forgettery set to work.

  It was a protective mechanism against unbearable grief, one which I, as a pediatrician, am persuaded all children have.

  Somewhere behind me, it seemed, was a twin sister who was not nearly as smart as I was. She had a name. Her name was Eliza Mellon Swain.

  *

  Yes, and the school year was so structured that none of us ever had to go home. I went to England and France and Germany and Italy and Greece. I went to summer camp.

  And it was determined that, while I was surely no genius, and was incapable of originality, I had a better than average mind. I was patient and orderly, and could sort out good ideas from heaps of balderdash.

  I was the first child in the history of the school to take College Boards. I did so well that I was invited to come to Harvard. I accepted the invitation, although my voice had yet to change.

  And I would now and then be reminded by my parents, who became very proud of me, that somewhere I had a twin sister who was little more than a human vegetable. She was in an expensive institution for people of her sort.

  She was only a name.

  *

  Father was killed in an automobile accident during my first year in medical school. He had thought enough of me to name me an executor of his will.

  And I was visited in Boston soon after that by a fat and shifty-eyed attorney named Norman Mushari, Jr. He told me what seemed at first to be a rambling and irrelevant story about a woman who had been locked away for many years against her will--in an institution for the feeble-minded.

  She had hired him, he said, to sue her relatives and the institution for damages, to gain her release at once, and to recover all inheritances which had been wrongly withheld.

  She had a name, which, of course, was Eliza Mellon Swain.

  21

  MOTHER WOULD SAY later of the hospital where we abandoned Eliza to Limbo: "It wasn't a cheap hospital, you know. It cost two hundred dollars a day. And the doctors begged us to stay away, didn't they, Wilbur?"

  "I think so, Mother," I said. And then I told the truth: "I forget."

  *

  I was then not only a stupid Bobby Brown, but a conceited one. Though only a first-year medical student with the genitalia of an infant field mouse, I was the master of a great house on Beacon Hill. I was driven to and from school in a Jaguar--and I had already taken to dressing as I would dress when President of the United States, like a medical mountebank during the era of Chester Alan Arthur, say.

  There was a party there nearly every night. I would customarily make an appearance of only a few minutes--smoking hashish in a meerschaum pipe, and wearing an emerald-green, watered-silk dressing gown.

  A pretty girl came up to me at one of those parties, and she said to me, "You are so ugly, you're the sexiest thing I ever saw."

  "I know," I said. "I know, I know."

  *

  Mother visited me a lot on Beacon Hill, where I had a special suite built just for her--and I visited her a lot in Turtle Bay. Yes, and reporters came to question us in both places after Norman Mushari, Jr., got Eliza out of the hospital.

  It was a big story.

  It was always a big story when multimillionaires mistreated their own relatives.

  Hi ho.

  *

  It was embarrassing, and should have been, of course.

  We had not seen Eliza yet, and had not been able to reach her by telephone. Meanwhile, though, she said justly insulting things about us almost every day in the press.

  All we had to show reporters was a copy of a telegram we had sent to Eliza, in care of her lawyer, and Eliza
's reply to it.

  Our telegram said:

  "WE LOVE YOU. YOUR MOTHER AND YOUR BROTHER."

  Eliza's telegram said this:

  "I LOVE YOU TOO. ELIZA."

  *

  Eliza would not allow herself to be photographed. She had her lawyer buy a confessional booth from a church which was being torn down. She sat inside it when she granted interviews for television.

  And Mother and I watched those interviews in agony, holding hands.

  And Eliza's rowdy contralto had become so unfamiliar to us that we thought there might be an imposter in the booth, but it was Eliza all right.

  I remember a television reporter asked her, "How did you spend your time in the hospital, Miss Swain?"

  "Singing," she said.

  "Singing anything in particular?" he said.

  "The same song--over and over again," she said.

  "What song was that?" he said.

  "'Some Day My Prince Will Come,'" she told him.

  "And did you have some specific prince in mind--as your rescuer?" he said.

  "My twin brother," she said. "But he's a swine, of course. He never came."

  22

  MOTHER AND I surely did not oppose Eliza and her lawyer in any way, so she easily regained control of her wealth. And nearly the first thing she did was to buy half-interest in The New England Patriots professional football team.

  *

  This purchase resulted in more publicity. Eliza would still not come out of the booth for cameras, but Mushari promised the world that she was now wearing a New England Patriots blue and gold jersey in there.

  She was asked in this particular interview if she kept up with current events, to which she replied: "I certainly don't blame the Chinamen for going home."

  This had to do with the Republic of China's closing its embassy in Washington. The miniaturization of human beings in China had progressed so far at that point, that their ambassador was only sixty centimeters tall. His farewell was polite and friendly. He said his country was severing relations simply because there was no longer anything going on in the United States which was of any interest to the Chinese at all.