So much, for now, for the wampeter of my karass.
After my unpleasant interview with Dr. Breed in the Research Laboratory of the General Forge and Foundry Company, I was put into the hands of Miss Faust. Her orders were to show me to the door. I prevailed upon her, however, to show me the laboratory of the late Dr Hoenikker first.
En route, I asked her how well she had known Dr. Hoenikker. She gave me a frank and interesting reply, and a piquant smile to go with it.
«I don’t think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they’re talking about secrets they’ve been told or haven’t been told. They’re talking about intimate things, family things, love things," that nice old lady said to me. «Dr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren’t the main things with him.»
«What were the main things?» I asked her.
«Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth.»
«You don’t seem to agree.»
«I don’t know whether I agree or not. I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.»
Miss Faust was ripe for Bokononism.
«Did you ever talk to Dr. Hoenikker?» I asked Miss Faust.
«Oh, certainly. I talked to him a lot.»
«Do any conversations stick in your mind?»
«There was one where he bet I couldn’t tell him anything that was absolutely true. So I said to him, ‘God is love.' «
«And what did he say?»
«He said, ‘What is God? What is love?' «
«Um.»
«But God really is love, you know," said Miss Faust, «no matter what Dr. Hoenikker said.»
The room that had been the laboratory of Dr. Felix Hoenikker was on the sixth floor, the top floor of the building.
A purple cord had been stretched across the doorway, and a brass plate on the wall explained why the room was sacred:
IN THIS ROOM, DR. FELIX HOENIKKER, NOBEL LAUREATE IN PHYSICS,
SPENT THE LAST TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS OF HIS LIFE.
«WHERE HE WAS, THERE WAS THE FRONTIER OF KNOWLEDGE.»
THE IMPORTANCE OF THIS ONE MAN IN THE
HISTORY OF MANKIND IS INCALCULABLE.
Miss Faust offered to unshackle the purple cord for me so that I might go inside and traffic more intimately with whatever ghosts there were.
I accepted.
«It's just as he left it," she said, «except that there were rubber bands all over one counter.»
«Rubber bands?»
«Don't ask me what for. Don’t ask me what any of all this is for.»
The old man had left the laboratory a mess. What engaged my attention at once was the quantity of cheap toys lying around. There was a paper kite with a broken spine. There was a toy gyroscope, wound with string, ready to whirr and balance itself. There was a top. There was a bubble pipe. There was a fish bowl with a castle and two turtles in it.
«He loved ten-cent stores," said Miss Faust.
«I can see he did.»
«Some of his most famous experiments were performed with equipment that cost less than a dollar.»
«A penny saved is a penny earned.»
There were numerous pieces of conventional laboratory equipment, too, of course, but they seemed drab accessories to the cheap, gay toys.
Dr. Hoenikker’s desk was piled with correspondence.
«I don’t think he ever answered a letter," mused Miss Faust. «People had to get him on the telephone or come to see him if they wanted an answer.»
There was a framed photograph on his desk. Its back was toward me and I ventured a guess as to whose picture it was. «His wife?»
«No.»
«One of his children?»
«No.»
«Himself?»
«No.»
So I took a look. I found that the picture was of an humble little war memorial in front of a small-town courthouse. Part of the memorial was a sign that gave the names of those villagers who had died in various wars, and I thought that the sign must be the reason for the photograph. I could read the names, and I half expected to find the name Hoenikker among them. It wasn’t there.
«That was one of his hobbies," said Miss Faust.
«What was?»
«Photographing how cannonballs are stacked on different courthouse lawns. Apparently how they’ve got them stacked in that picture is very unusual.»
«I see.»
«He was an unusual man.»
«I agree.»
«Maybe in a million years everybody will be as smart as he was and see things the way he did. But, compared with the average person of today, he was as different as a man from Mars.»
«Maybe he really was a Martian," I suggested.
«That would certainly go a long way toward explaining his three strange kids.»
While Miss Faust and I waited for an elevator to take us to the first floor, Miss Faust said she hoped the elevator that came would not be number five. Before I could ask her why this was a reasonable wish, number five arrived.
Its operator was a small ancient Negro whose name was Lyman Enders Knowles. Knowles was insane, I’m almost sure — offensively so, in that he grabbed his own behind and cried, «Yes, yes!» whenever he felt that he’d made a point.
«Hello, fellow anthropoids and lily pads and paddlewheels," he said to Miss Faust and me. «Yes, yes!»
«First floor, please," said Miss Faust coldly.
All Knowles had to do to close the door and get us to the first floor was to press a button, but he wasn’t going to do that yet. He wasn’t going to do it, maybe, for years.
«Man told me," he said, «that these here elevators was Mayan architecture. I never knew that till today. And I says to him, ‘What's that make me — mayonnaise?' Yes, yes! And while he was thinking that over, I hit him with a question that straightened him up and made him think twice as hard! Yes, yes!»
«Could we please go down, Mr. Knowles?» begged Miss Faust.
«I said to him," said Knowles, «‘This here’s a re-search laboratory. Re-search means look again, don’t it? Means they’re looking for something they found once and it got away somehow, and now they got to re-search for it? How come they got to build a building like this, with mayonnaise elevators and all, and fill it with all these crazy people? What is it they’re trying to find again? Who lost what?' Yes, yes!»
«That's very interesting," sighed Miss Faust. «Now, could we go down?»
«Only way we can go is down," barked Knowles. «This here’s the top. You ask me to go up and wouldn’t be a thing I could do for you. Yes, yes!»
«So let’s go down," said Miss Faust.
«Very soon now. This gentleman here been paying his respects to Dr. Hoenikker?»
«Yes," I said. «Did you know him?»
«Intimately," he said. «You know what I said when he died?»
«No.»
«I said, ‘Dr. Hoenikker — he ain’t dead.' «
«Oh?»
«Just entered a new dimension. Yes, yes!» He punched a button, and down we went.
«Did you know the Hoenikker children?» I asked him.
«Babies full of rabies," he said. «Yes, yes!»
There was one more thing I wanted to do in Ilium. I wanted to get a photograph of the old man’s tomb. So I went back to my room, found Sandra gone, picked up my camera, hired a cab.
Sleet was still coming down, acid and gray. I thought the old man’s tombstone in all that sleet might photograph pretty well, might even make a good picture for the jacket of The Day the World Ended.
The custodian at the cemetery gate told me how to find the Hoenikker burial plot. «Can't miss it," he said. «It's got the biggest marker in the place.»
He did not lie. The marker was an alabaster phallus twenty feet high and three feet thick. It was plastered with sleet.
«By God," I exclaimed, getting out of the cab with my camera, «how's that for a suitable memorial to a father of the atom bomb?» I laughed.
I asked the driver if he’d mind standing by the monument in order to give some idea of scale. And then I asked him to wipe away some of the sleet so the name of the deceased would show.
He did so.
And there on the shaft in letters six inches high, so help me God, was the word:
MOTHER
«Mother?» asked the driver, incredulously.
I wiped away more sleet and uncovered this poem:
—Angela Hoenikker
And under this poem was yet another;
—Franklin Hoenikker
And underneath this, inset in the shaft, was a square of cement bearing the imprint of an infant’s hand. Beneath the imprint were the words:
Baby Newt.
«If that’s Mother," said the driver, «what in hell could they have raised over Father?» He made an obscene suggestion as to what the appropriate marker might be.
We found Father close by. His memorial — as specified in his will, I later discovered — was a marble cube forty centimeters on each side.
«FATHER," it said.
As we were leaving the cemetery the driver of the cab worried about the condition of his own mother’s grave. He asked if I would mind taking a short detour to look at it.
It was a pathetic little stone that marked his mother— not that it mattered.
And the driver asked me if I would mind another brief detour, this time to a tombstone salesroom across the street from the cemetery.
I wasn’t a Bokononist then, so I agreed with some peevishness. As a Bokononist, of course, I would have agreed gaily to go anywhere anyone suggested. As Bokonon says: «Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.»
The name of the tombstone establishment was Avram Breed and Sons. As the driver talked to the salesman I wandered among the monuments — blank monuments, monuments in memory of nothing so far.
I found a little institutional joke in the showroom: over a stone angel hung mistletoe. Cedar boughs were heaped on her pedestal, and around her marble throat was a necklace of Christmas tree lamps.
«How much for her?» I asked the salesman.
«Not for sale. She’s a hundred years old. My greatgrandfather, Avram Breed, carved her.»
«This business is that old?»
«That's right.»
«And you’re a Breed?»
«The fourth generation in this location.»
«Any relation to Dr. Asa Breed, the director of the Research Laboratory?»
«His brother.» He said his name was Marvin Breed.
«It's a small world," I observed.
«When you put it in a cemetery, it is.» Marvin Breed was a sleek and vulgar, a smart and sentimental man.
«I just came from your brother’s office. I’m a writer. I was interviewing him about Dr. Hoenikker," I said to Marvin Breed.
«There was one queer son of a bitch. Not my brother; I mean Hoenikker.»
«Did you sell him that monument for his wife?»
«I sold his kids that. He didn’t have anything to do with it. He never got around to putting any kind of marker on her grave. And then, after she’d been dead for a year or more, Hoenikker’s three kids came in here — the big tall girl, the boy, and the little baby. They wanted the biggest stone money could buy, and the two older ones had poems they’d written. They wanted the poems on the stone.
«You can laugh at that stone, if you want to," said Marvin Breed, «but those kids got more consolation out of that than anything else money could have bought. They used to come and look at it and put flowers on it I-don't-know-how-many-times a year.»
«It must have cost a lot.»
«Nobel Prize money bought it. Two things that money bought: a cottage on Cape Cod and that monument.»
«Dynamite money," I marveled, thinking of the violence of dynamite and the absolute repose of a tombstone and a summer home.
«What?»
«Nobel invented dynamite.»
«Well, I guess it takes all kinds…»
Had I been a Bokononist then, pondering the miraculously intricate chain of events that had brought dynamite money to that particular tombstone company, I might have whispered, «Busy, busy, busy.»
Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
But all I could say as a Christian then was, «Life is sure funny sometimes.»
«And sometimes it isn’t," said Marvin Breed.
I asked Marvin Breed if he’d known Emily Hoenikker, the wife of Felix; the mother of Angela, Frank, and Newt; the woman under that monstrous shaft.
«Know her?» His voice turned tragic. «Did I know her, mister? Sure, I knew her. I knew Emily. We went to Ilium High together. We were co-chairmen of the Class Colors Committee then. Her father owned the Ilium Music Store. She could play every musical instrument there was. I fell so hard for her I gave up football and tried to play the violin. And then my big brother Asa came home for spring vacation from M. I.T., and I made the mistake of introducing him to my best girl.» Marvin Breed snapped his fingers. «He took her away from me just like that. I smashed up my seventy-five-dollar violin on a big brass knob at the foot of my bed, and I went down to a florist shop and got the kind of box they put a dozen roses in, and I put the busted fiddle in the box, and I sent it to her by Western Union messenger boy.»
«Pretty, was she?»
«Pretty?» he echoed. «Mister, when I see my first lady angel, if God ever sees fit to show me one, it’ll be her wings and not her face that’ll make my mouth fall open. I’ve already seen the prettiest face that ever could be. There wasn’t a man in Ilium County who wasn’t in love with her, secretly or otherwise. She could have had any man she wanted.» He spit on his own floor. «And she had to go and marry that little Dutch son of a bitch! She was engaged to my brother, and then that sneaky little bastard hit town.» Marvin Breed snapped his fingers again. «He took her away from my big brother like that.
«I suppose it’s high treason and ungrateful and ignorant and backward and anti-intellectual to call a dead man as famous as Felix Hoenikker a son of a bitch. I know all about how harmless and gentle and dreamy he was supposed to be, how he’d never hurt a fly, how he didn’t care about money and power and fancy clothes and automobiles and things, how he wasn’t like the rest of us, how he was better than the rest of us, how he was so innocent he was practically a Jesus — except for the Son of God part.
Marvin Breed felt it was unnecessary to complete his thought. I had to ask him to do it.
«But what?» he said. «But what?» He went to a window looking out at the cemetery gate. «But what," he murmured at the gate and the sleet and the Hoenikker shaft that could be dimly seen.
«But," he said, «but how the hell innocent is a man who helps make a thing like an atomic bomb? And how can you say a man had a good mind when he couldn’t even bother to do anything when the best-hearted, most beautiful woman in the world, his own wife, was dying for lack of love and understanding…»
He shuddered, «Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.»
It was in the tombstone salesroom that I had my first vin-dit, a Bokononist word meaning a sudden, very personal shove in the direction of Bokononism, in the direction of believing that God Almighty knew all about me, after all, that God Almighty had some pretty elaborate plans for me.
The vin-dit had to do with the stone angel under the mistletoe. The cab driver had gotten it into his head that he had to have that angel for his mother’s grave at any price. He was standing in front of it with tears in his eyes.
Marvin Breed was still staring out the window at the cemetery gate, having just said his piece about Felix Hoenikker. «The little Dutch son of a bitch may have been a modern holy man," he added, «But Goddamn if he ever did anything he didn’t want to, and Goddamn if he didn’t get everything he ever wanted.
«Music," he said.
«Pardon me?» I asked.
«That's why she married him. She said his mind was tuned to the biggest music there was, the music of the stars.» He shook his head. «Crap.»
And then the gate reminded him of the last time he’d seen Frank Hoenikker, the model-maker, the tormentor of bugs in jars. «Frank," he said.
«What about him?»
«The last I saw of that poor, queer kid was when he came out through that cemetery gate. His father’s funeral was still going on. The old man wasn’t underground yet, and out through the gate came Frank. He raised his thumb at the first car that came by. It was a new Pontiac with a Florida license plate. It stopped. Frank got in it, and that was the last anybody in Ilium ever saw of him.»
«I hear he’s wanted by the police.»
«That was an accident, a freak. Frank wasn’t any criminal. He didn’t have that kind of nerve. The only work he was any good at was model-making. The only job he ever held onto was at Jack’s Hobby Shop, selling models, making models, giving people advice on how to make models. When he cleared out of here, went to Florida, he got a job in a model shop in Sarasota. Turned out the model shop was a front for a ring that stole Cadillacs, ran 'em straight on board old L. S.T.'s and shipped 'em to Cuba. That’s how Frank got balled up in all that. I expect the reason the cops haven’t found him is he’s dead. He just heard too much while he was sticking turrets on the battleship Missouri with Duco Cement.»
«Where's Newt now, do you know?»
«Guess he’s with his sister in Indianapolis. Last I heard was he got mixed up with that Russian midget and flunked out of pre-med at Cornell. Can you imagine a midget trying to become a doctor? And, in that same miserable family, there’s that great big, gawky girl, over six feet tall. That man, who’s so famous for having a great mind, he pulled that girl out of high school in her sophomore year so he could go on having some woman take care of him. All she had going for her was the clarinet she’d played in the Ilium High School band, the Marching Hundred.
«After she left school," said Breed, «nobody ever asked her out. She didn’t have any friends, and the old man never even thought to give her any money to go anywhere. You know what she used to do?»
«Nope.»
«Every so often at night she’d lock herself in her room and she’d play records, and she’d play along with the records on her clarinet. The miracle of this age, as far as I’m concerned, is that that woman ever got herself a husband.»
«How much do you want for this angel?» asked the cab driver.
«I've told you, it’s not for sale.»
«I don’t suppose there’s anybody around who can do that kind of stone cutting any more," I observed.
«I've got a nephew who can," said Breed. «Asa's boy. He was all set to be a heap-big re-search scientist, and then they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and the kid quit, and he got drunk, and he came out here, and he told me he wanted to go to work cutting stone.»
«He works here now?»
«He's a sculptor in Rome.»
«If somebody offered you enough," said the driver, «you'd take it, wouldn’t you?»
«Might. But it would take a lot of money.»
«Where would you put the name on a thing like that?» asked the driver.
«There's already a name on it — on the pedestal.» We couldn’t see the name, because of the boughs banked against the pedestal.
«It was never called for?» I wanted to know.
«It was never paid for. The way the story goes: this German immigrant was on his way West with his wife, and she died of smallpox here in Ilium. So he ordered this angel to be put up over her, and he showed my great-grandfather he had the cash to pay for it. But then he was robbed. Somebody took practically every cent he had. All he had left in this world was some land he’d bought in Indiana, land he’d never seen. So he moved on — said he’d be back later to pay for the angel.»
«But he never came back?» I asked.
«Nope.» Marvin Breed nudged some of the boughs aside with his toe so that we could see the raised letters on the pedestal. There was a last name written there. «There's a screwy name for you," he said. «If that immigrant had any descendants, I expect they Americanized the name. They’re probably Jones or Black or Thompson now.»
«There you’re wrong," I murmured.
The room seemed to tip, and its walls and ceiling and floor were transformed momentarily into the mouths of many tunnels — tunnels leading in all directions through time. I had a Bokononist vision of the unity in every second of all time and all wandering mankind, all wandering womankind, all wandering children.
«There you’re wrong," I said, when the vision was gone.
«You know some people by that name?»
«Yes.»
The name was my last name, too.
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