Cat's Cradle (15 page)

“Bokonon suggested the hook, too, as the proper punishment for Bokononists,” he said. “It was something he’d seen in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s.” He winked ghoulishly. “That was for zest, too.”

“Did many people die on the hook?”

“Not at first, not at first. At first it was all make-believe. Rumors were cunningly circulated about executions, but no one really knew anyone who had died that way. McCabe had a good old time making bloodthirsty threats against the Bokononists—which was everybody.

“And Bokonon went into cozy hiding in the jungle,” Castle continued, “where he wrote and preached all day long and ate good things his disciples brought him.

“McCabe would organize the unemployed,
which was practically everybody, into great Bokonon hunts.

“About every six months McCabe would announce triumphantly that Bokonon was surrounded by a ring of steel, which was remorselessly closing in.

“And then the leaders of the remorseless ring would have to report to McCabe, full of chagrin and apoplexy, that Bokonon had done the impossible.

“He had escaped, had evaporated, had lived to preach another day. Miracle!”

“M
C
C
ABE AND
B
OKONON
did not succeed in raising what is generally thought of as the standard of living,” said Castle. “The truth was that life was as short and brutish and mean as ever.

“But people didn’t have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they
understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.”

“So life became a work of art,” I marveled.

“Yes. There was only one trouble with it.”

“Oh?”

“The drama was very tough on the souls of the two main actors, McCabe and Bokonon. As young men, they had been pretty much alike, had both been half-angel, half-pirate.

“But the drama demanded that the pirate half of Bokonon and the angel half of McCabe wither away. And McCabe and Bokonon paid a terrible price in agony for the happiness of the people—McCabe knowing the agony of the tyrant and Bokonon knowing the agony of the saint. They both became, for all practical purposes, insane.”

Castle crooked the index finger of his left hand. “And then, people really did start dying on the
hy-u-o-ook-kuh.”

“But Bokonon was never caught?” I asked.

“McCabe never went that crazy. He never made a really serious effort to catch Bokonon. It would have been easy to do.”

“Why didn’t he catch him?”

“McCabe was always sane enough to realize that without the holy man to war against, he himself would become meaningless. ‘Papa’ Monzano understands that, too.”

“Do people still die on the hook?”

“It’s inevitably fatal.”

“I mean,” I said, “does ‘Papa’ really have people executed that way?”

“He executes one every two years—-just to keep the pot boiling, so to speak.” He sighed, looking up at the evening sky. “Busy, busy, busy.”

“Sir?”

“It’s what we Bokononists say,” he said, “when we feel that a lot of mysterious things are going on.”

“You?” I was amazed. “A Bokononist, too?”

He gazed at me levelly. “You, too. You’ll find out.”

A
NGELA AND
N
EWT
were on the cantilevered terrace with Julian Castle and me. We had cocktails. There was still no word from Frank.

Both Angela and Newt, it appeared, were fairly heavy drinkers. Castle told me that his days as a playboy had cost him a kidney, and that he was unhappily compelled, perforce, to stick to ginger ale.

Angela, when she got a few drinks into her, complained of how the world had swindled her father. “He gave so much, and they gave him so little.”

I pressed her for examples of the world’s stinginess and got some exact numbers. “General Forge and Foundry gave him a forty-five-dollar bonus for every patent his work led to,” she said. “That’s the same patent bonus they paid anybody in the company.” She shook her head mournfully. “Forty-five dollars—and just think what some of those patents were for!”

“Um,” I said. “I assume he got a salary, too.”

“The most he ever made was twenty-eight thousand dollars a year.”

“I’d say that was pretty good.”

She got very huffy. “You know what movie stars make?”

“A lot, sometimes.”

“You know Dr. Breed made ten thousand more dollars a year than Father did?”

“That was certainly an injustice.”

“I’m sick of injustice.”

She was so shrilly exercised that I changed the subject. I asked Julian Castle what he thought had become of the painting he had thrown down the waterfall.

“There’s a little village at the bottom,” he told me. “Five or ten shacks, I’d say. It’s ‘Papa’ Monzano’s birthplace, incidentally. The waterfall ends in a big stone bowl there.

“The villagers have a net made out of chicken wire stretched across a notch in the bowl. Water spills out through the notch into a stream.”

“And Newt’s painting is in the net now, you think?” I asked.

“This is a poor country—in case you haven’t noticed,” said Castle. “Nothing stays in the net very long. I imagine Newt’s painting is being dried in the sun by now, along with the butt of my cigar. Four square feet of gummy canvas, the four milled and mitered sticks of the stretcher, some tacks, too, and a cigar. All in all, a pretty nice catch for some poor, poor man.”

“I could just scream sometimes,” said Angela, “when I think about how much some people get paid and how little they paid Father—and how much he gave.” She was on the edge of a crying jag.

“Don’t cry,” Newt begged her gently.

“Sometimes I can’t help it,” she said.

“Go get your clarinet,” urged Newt. “That always helps.”

I thought at first that this was a fairly comical suggestion. But then, from Angela’s reaction, I learned that the suggestion was serious and practical.

“When I get this way,” she said to Castle and me, “sometimes it’s the only thing that helps.”

But she was too shy to get her clarinet right away. We had to keep begging her to play, and she had to have two more drinks.

“She’s really just wonderful,” little Newt promised.

“I’d love to hear you play,” said Castle.

“All right,” said Angela finally as she rose unsteadily. “All right—I will.”

When she was out of earshot, Newt apologized for her. “She’s had a tough time. She needs a rest.”

“She’s been sick?” I asked.

“Her husband is mean as hell to her,” said Newt. He showed us that he hated Angela’s handsome young husband, the extremely successful Harrison C. Conners, President of FabriTek. “He hardly ever comes home—and, when he does, he’s drunk and generally covered with lipstick.”

“From the way she talked,” I said, “I thought it was a very happy marriage.”

Little Newt held his hands six inches apart and he spread his fingers. “See the cat? See the cradle?”

I
DID NOT KNOW
what was going to come from Angela’s clarinet. No one could have imagined what was going to come from there.

I expected something pathological, but I did not expect the depth, the violence, and the almost intolerable beauty of the disease.

Angela moistened and warmed the mouthpiece, but did not blow a single preliminary note. Her eyes glazed over, and her long, bony fingers twittered idly over the noiseless keys.

I waited anxiously, and I remembered what Marvin Breed had told me—that Angela’s one escape from her bleak life with her father was to her room, where she would lock the door and play along with phonograph records.

Newt now put a long-playing record on the large phonograph in the room off the terrace. He came back with the record’s slipcase, which he handed to me.

The record was called
Cat House Piano
. It was of unaccompanied piano by Meade Lux Lewis.

Since Angela, in order to deepen her trance, let
Lewis play his first number without joining him, I read some of what the jacket said about Lewis.

“Born in Louisville, Ky., in 1905,” I read, “Mr. Lewis didn’t turn to music until he had passed his 16th birthday and then the instrument provided by his father was the violin. A year later young Lewis chanced to hear Jimmy Yancey play the piano. ‘This,’ as Lewis recalls, ‘was the real thing.’ Soon,” I read, ’Lewis was teaching himself to play the boogie-woogie piano, absorbing all that was possible from the older Yancey, who remained until his death a close friend and idol to Mr. Lewis. Since his father was a Pullman porter,” I read, “the Lewis family lived near the railroad. The rhythm of the trains soon became a natural pattern to young Lewis and he composed the boogie-woogie solo, now a classic of its kind, which became known as ‘Honky Tonk Train Blues.’”

I looked up from my reading. The first number on the record was done. The phonograph needle was now scratching its slow way across the void to the second. The second number, I learned from the jacket, was “Dragon Blues.”

Meade Lux Lewis played four bars alone—and then Angela Hoenikker joined in.

Her eyes were closed.

I was flabbergasted.

She was great.

She improvised around the music of the Pullman porter’s son; went from liquid lyricism to rasping lechery
to the shrill skittishness of a frightened child, to a heroin nightmare.

Her glissandi spoke of heaven and hell and all that lay between.

Such music from such a woman could only be a case of schizophrenia or demonic possession.

My hair stood on end, as though Angela were rolling on the floor, foaming at the mouth, and babbling fluent Babylonian.

When the music was done, I shrieked at Julian Castle, who was transfixed, too, “My God—life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?”

“Don’t try,” he said. “Just pretend you understand.”

“That’s—that’s very good advice,” I went limp.

Castle quoted another poem:

“What’s that from?” I asked.

“What could it possibly be from but
The Books of Bokonon?”

“I’d love to see a copy sometime.”

“Copies are hard to come by,” said Castle. “They
aren’t printed. They’re made by hand. And, of course, there is no such thing as a completed copy, since Bokonon is adding things every day.”

Little Newt snorted. “Religion!”

“Beg your pardon?” Castle said.

“See the cat?” asked Newt. “See the cradle?”

M
AJOR
G
ENERAL
F
RANKLIN
H
OENIKKER
didn’t appear for supper.

He telephoned, and insisted on talking to me and to no one else. He told me that he was keeping a vigil by “Papa’s” bed; that “Papa” was dying in great pain. Frank sounded scared and lonely.

“Look,” I said, “why don’t I go back to my hotel, and you and I can get together later, when this crisis is over.”

“No, no, no. You stay right there! I want you to be where I can get hold of you right away!” He was panicky about my slipping out of his grasp. Since I couldn’t account for his interest in me, I began to feel panic, too.

“Could you give me some idea what you want to see me about?” I asked.

“Not over the telephone.”

“Something about your father?”

“Something about yow.”

“Something I’ve done?”

“Something you’re
going
to do.”

I heard a chicken clucking in the background of Frank’s end of the line. I heard a door open, and xylophone music came from some chamber. The music was again “When Day Is Done.” And then the door was closed, and I couldn’t hear the music any more.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d give me some small hint of what you expect me to do—so I can sort of get set,” I said.

“Zah-mah-ki-bo. ”

“What?”

“It’s a Bokononist word.”

“I don’t know any Bokononist words.”

“Julian Castle’s there?”

“Yes.”

“Ask him,” said Frank. “I’ve got to go now.” He hung up.

So I asked Julian Castle what
zah-mah-ki-bo
meant.

“You want a simple answer or a whole answer?”

“Let’s start with a simple one.”

“Fate—inevitable destiny.”

“C
ANCER
,” said Julian Castle at dinner, when I told him that “Papa” was dying in pain.

“Cancer of what?”

“Cancer of about everything. You say he collapsed on the reviewing stand today?”

“He sure did,” said Angela.

“That was the effect of drugs,” Castle declared. “He’s at the point now where drugs and pain just about balance out. More drugs would kill him.”

“I’d kill myself, I think,” murmured Newt. He was sitting on a sort of folding high chair he took with him when he went visiting. It was made of aluminum tubing and canvas. “It beats sitting on a dictionary, an atlas, and a telephone book,” he’d said when he erected it.

“That’s what Corporal McCabe did, of course,” said Castle. “He named his major-domo as his successor, then he shot himself.”

“Cancer, too?” I asked.

“I can’t be sure; I don’t think so, though. Unrelieved villainy just wore him out, is my guess. That was all before my time.”

“This certainly is a cheerful conversation,” said Angela.

“I think everybody would agree that these are cheerful times,” said Castle.

“Well,” I said to him, “I’d think you would have more reasons for being cheerful than most, doing what you are doing with your life.”