Читать книгу Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: Bookmarked - Curtis Smith - Страница 10
ОглавлениеI can only imagine.
No, I can’t.
I found a picture. Cinder blocks propping long metal beams, the open space beneath, oxygen for the flames. Atop the beams, stacked bodies. Forty, fifty, more. Feet and hands. A child, and I look away. I wanted to draw the scene, but I can’t. Sadder still—the picture isn’t one of a kind. It’s an echo. A turn of the wheel.
Here’s what I’ll draw—a frame. Fill it how you like. How you must. God bless us all.
*
“All this happened, more or less.”
The first line of Slaughterhouse-Five is a trickster’s greeting, a fitting introduction from a guide as charming as he is sly. With these words, Kurt Vonnegut opens a door, and as we cross the threshold, we enter a realm dimly lit and full of mirrors, a set built with the warped architecture of dreams. The door shuts. We’ve entered the slaughterhouse, and the only exit leads to a moonscape of smoking rubble.
In the first chapter, Vonnegut (or the character who claims to be Vonnegut) travels back to Dresden, the city whose destruction he witnessed as a POW. He brings a book with him—Erika Ostrovsky’s Céline and His Vision. Céline was a soldier wounded in World War I, and upon his return home, he suffered sleeplessness and auditory hallucinations. At night, while those untouched by the war dreamt, he penned grotesque novels. He wrote, “No art is possible without a dance with death.”
There is death in Slaughterhouse-Five, death on almost every page. Some are deaths of individuals, others occur in the thousands. So it goes. The dance goes round and round, picking up partners along the way. The dance swirls through time and space. Our partner is a master, light on his feet, as old as time itself, and when he whispers in our ear, we smile at the absurdity of all that has come before. Death holds us close, and when we return the embrace, we understand the hollowness of worldly desires and the foolishness of men, their stupidity, their brutality. We laugh. What else can we do?
*
The focus of Slaughterhouse-Five is the firebombing of Dresden. Vonnegut claims 135,000 men, women, and children were incinerated; other estimates place the tally closer to 30,000. Exact numbers are impossible—the city, thought safe by many, was full of refugees. A population uncounted. The destruction so complete.
Some contend the first, and most complete, massacre inflicted upon humankind occurred around 2350 BC with the Great Flood. Listen to Genesis 7: 21-22: “And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: all in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.”
Drowning often makes lists of the most-feared ways to die. A drowning man will attempt to hold his breath until he gives over to the breathing reflex. Consciousness can linger for minutes. The panic is thought to be terrifying.
I can imagine all those people beneath the water thinking, Please help me, God!
*
The Ardmore Bookstore was nestled in a long brick row, the same block as the Army-Navy and a generations-old theater destined to fade in the coming age of multiplexes. I lived a little over a mile away, a walk through blue-collar neighborhoods just outside Philly’s city line. Our neighborhood white, the bordering neighborhood black, a passing made with caution. Sometimes words were exchanged, sometimes I ran. The cruelty of children.
Forty years have passed. I see my sneakers on baking July sidewalks. I see them kicking brown leaves and sliding over powdery snow. All trips become one trip, a trick of memory. I am thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. There’s money in my pocket—singles and quarters. Perhaps a five. I am alone or with a friend or two. Those different times, my house left with only the promise to be back by dinner.
A parking lot sat behind the bookstore. The terrain on a gentle slant, the spaces filled on weekend nights for the theater’s latest films. A hundred parking meters, a hundred sundial shadows, thin stains that stretched longer as the afternoon wore on. Of course the bookstore had a front entrance, the wide sidewalk, the avenue’s bustle, but I preferred the back. A simple sign, a clandestine portal. A bell on the door. The hallway a cramped passage. A choking of boxes, deliveries and returns. The store long and narrow, the shelves running parallel from front to back. The space brighter in the front. The counter with the register, its newspapers for sale. The plate glass window that looked upon Lancaster Avenue. Behind the register, the owners, the husband or wife or sometimes both, a quiet couple, their attention often on the books they read between ringing up customers.
No scent of brewing coffee flavored the air, no music played. Only stillness and the hushed voices of searchers like me. Here was my ritual: I roamed the aisles, selecting books. In my hands, the weight of voices and stories. I was a shaggy-haired teen with only a few dollars in my pocket, but I was never hurried along. I’d find a corner and read first pages, and one by one, I returned the books to their shelves, a whittling that left me with the book I would take home.
I still have my first copy of Slaughterhouse-Five. The price is marked on the cover—1.50—and although I have no recollection of that day, I see myself counting change on the counter, see myself walking home in the sun or cold or rain. Forgotten or not, the moment exists, knotted into the fabric that will disappear with my death.
Forty years, and I remove the rubber bands that hold the book together. I open the cover. The taped spine crackles.
*
Biblical experts believe the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah occurred around 2065 BC. As punishment for their wickedness, the Lord rained down fire and brimstone, destroying the city and its evil residents. Only Lot, a man deemed the sole virtuous inhabitant of Sodom, and his family were spared. The angels instructed Lot and his clan not to look back upon their burning city. When Lot’s wife disobeyed, the death count increased by one.
How did Lot prove his worthiness to the angels the Lord had sent to find the righteous in Sodom? When an angry mob gathered at Lot’s door, demanding the flesh of his angel visitors, he instead offered them his virgin daughters. That’s how.
Sodom was burnt to cinders, but it’s lived on in the word “sodomy.” Prior to the 1970’s, many states had sodomy laws that prohibited oral sex between married couples.
Being burnt alive often tops drowning in lists of most-feared ways to die.
*
Another list: Slaughterhouse-Five sits at 29th place on the American Library Association’s ranking of most frequently banned books. Since its release, Slaughterhouse-Five has been pulled from school curriculums and library shelves. In 1972, a Michigan Circuit judge deemed the story of Billy Pilgrim “depraved, immoral, psychotic, and anti-Christian.” In North Dakota, a collection of classroom copies was burned in the high-school furnace. Kurt Vonnegut, who knew a thing or two about fire and Nazis, might have been amused.
Few who’ve read Slaughterhouse-Five believe it’s been attacked for its mentioning of blowjobs or baby-making. There is disgust in the book. There is, beneath the sardonic laughter, a tide disturbing and deep. Cruelty. Inhumanity. The crimes of war. The layers of human bone meal beneath a once-beautiful city. Here are the book’s real obscenities.
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” So says First Corinthians, and here is Vonnegut’s true crime—the holding close of a dark glass. He ingratiates himself with humor and a breezy voice and then slays us with truth. War is fought by children. So much is beyond us. The wheel turns, and we’re ground to dust. We have been lied to, over and over again. Slaughterhouse-Five is un-American if being American means unquestioning obedience. It’s subversive—if being subversive isn’t believing one’s birthright guarantees one residence in the shining city upon the hill. It’s anti-Christia—if one’s view of Christianity is more aligned with Sodom-leveling God of the Old Testament than with the New’s gospel of love thy neighbor.
I’ve taught in a public high school for the past thirty-three years. I know a thing or two about learning. I’ve had my good days and bad. I worry about the state of the profession I still love, its hijacking by bureaucrats, its allegiance to standardized testing. We have lost the fact that not all values can be quantified and that data can’t trump the nuances of perception or the gift of appreciation. Here’s what I know: within ten years, 95% of current algebra students won’t remember how to graph a parabola. History students will forget the details of the Compromise of 1850. They will have no idea how to calculate planetary motion. What will remain are the times that they were asked to engage in the questioning and defense that forms the framework of a compassionate mind. What they won’t forget are the books and teachers who’ve challenged them to look in the dark glass and describe what they see.
*
And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate the librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to the thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of public libraries.
*
By the time I graduated high school, I’d read most of Vonnegut’s novels—Mother Night, Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions. An English teacher noticed the titles. “So you like science fiction,” he said. Thing was I didn’t like science fiction, or at least I didn’t like Tolkien, Heinlein, or Herbert. True, Vonnegut wrote about time travel and aliens, but his other-worldly elements paled beneath his humanity. His humor. His questioning of a society that had lost its way. His precipice-toeing view of the abyss that lurked beneath America’s postwar dream. He was unafraid to shout that the emperor had no clothes, and more than any other writer of his generation, he knew how to make us wear an uncomfortable smile.
When I started this project, I retrieved my copy of Slaughterhouse-Five from its shelf. The book had followed me over the years, packed and unpacked, a haze of a half-dozen apartments before we settled into our house. Years before the pages had come loose in chunks. Before my rereading, I took an evening to restore the book. I applied clear shipping tape to the cover. A new binding of duct-tape strips and a rejoining of the spine with super glue. Imperfect but passable. I held the cover and pulled back my thumb, a fanning of yellowed pages, a scent I hope my son will still cherish. I began to read. I underlined passages, and with the first page’s tear, I employed a lighter touch. I rejoined an echo, the person I was before the deterioration of cartilage and bone, before the adult’s humbling knowledge of how much was beyond me. Hello, young man, I called across the decades. Hello!
A few years ago I was rooting through our basement, and in box, I found a packet of old photographs. My early college days. Dorm life. Parties. A young me spinning a Frisbee on his finger. In the box’s bottom, a glimpse of red, and I pulled out the slender notebook I hadn’t held in years. Inside, the dream journal I penned as a freshman. I’d conditioned myself to wake and write, pages of bleary sentences, my penmanship a sloppy flirting with the printed lines. I sat amid the basement clutter and began to read. I was astonished how vivid the dreams were, their hues vibrant, my memory so often choked with soot and chalk. The photographs were two-dimensional proof of young faces and dated fashions, but the dreams I now revisited pulled at me, a tug in my gut. Here waited another brand of memory, one cooked up in my subconscious and played out in a code I’d never understand.
I turned another page of Slaughterhouse-Five and carefully penned a note in the margin. The teenager who first read these pages was gone, but he also waited, drifting, still breathing in my dreams.
*
“What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, ‘This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!’ Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, ‘Never have I heard anything more divine’?”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
*
Twenty years have passed. I’m doing my best to remember, but my brain is filled with detritus, and conjured ghosts have taken the place of facts. Forgive me . . .
I am an agnostic in a beautiful church. The space majestic, high ceilings, adornments simple and modern, the stained glass dark on this mild, fall evening. Our tickets are collected at the door, and we find a spot in a pew near the back. The event sold out, the chapel’s capacity a bit over five hundred. More file in, and we scoot over, making room. A hundred different conversations, a haze of voices that evaporates when the English Department Chair steps to the pulpit. Thanks are given to the endowments that have made this all possible, then the introduction.
Applause greets the guest as he rises to the microphone. I am thirty-five, the years before the blurring of my vision, and despite our distance, I see him clearly, the brown jacket and blue shirt, the unruly hair. He begins to speak, and the persona he projects—humble yet sharp, self-effacing, insightful—meshes perfectly with the voice I have come to know through the artifice of a dozen novels.
Fifty years have passed since Dresden. He talks about the firebombing and the slaughterhouse, specifics in one man’s story that form a frame for a larger, sadder picture of all wars. Dresden, he contends, wasn’t a tragedy. Dresden was just a turn of an endless wheel. Dresden was our horror and our fate.
Yet the mood is light. There are flowers on the altar and smiles all around. Vonnegut praises the everyday saints, the good people who behave decently in an indecent world. He confesses his secret passion for the woman who works at his local post-office window and the happiness he finds in the suddenly quaint ritual of mailing an envelope. He claims he’s suing R. J. Reynolds because his beloved Pall Malls haven’t killed him already. I laugh with the others even though I’ve heard some of this before, threads repeated from his recent essays, and I wonder if I’m listening to Kurt Vonnegut or another Billy Pilgrim.
He ends with a Q & A, but then claims the first and only question. He asks if we’ve ever had a teacher who’s made a difference, and if so, would we please tell the person next to us their name. He thanks us, wishes us well, and says goodnight. A murmur rises in the chapel and the names of teachers are exchanged, the space filling with the memories of those who’ve remained with us all these years. The ones who shaped and challenged us. The ones who guided us when we were lost. My wife and I step back into the night. Cooler now, the stars crisp. I think of the wheels that turn with or without me. I think of the life within my grasp and the blessings of everyday saints.
*
Researchers at Anglia Ruskin University have been analyzing texts from ancient Mesopotamia. The accounts, which date back to 1300 BC and the early days of the Assyrian Dynasty, describe accounts of men who’d survived battle but who were then haunted by ghosts. The faces of fallen comrades. The men they’d slain.
*
The Tralfamadorians told Billy Pilgrim that one time was all time. Our flesh is a vessel, and time fills us, and when the brain’s neuron storm goes dark, the liquid and flowing parts of our lives end. We are emptied, but the time we’ve lived is never gone. Our breathing days still exist—but only in a manner we have yet to comprehend.
The nature of time, the inevitability of death, the atrocities we so readily commit, and how we carry the memories of what we’ve seen—these form the novel’s crux, yet they are not separate strains. Becoming unstuck in time was Billy’s reflex to the nightmare of war. He tumbles heedlessly through his years. He sees his death. He can—and can’t—escape his time as a soldier and prisoner. Critics have combed the pages and unearthed a number of inaccuracies in Billy Pilgrim’s chronology. The years and months are sometimes skewed, the math of ages and anniversaries not adding up. Yet this is how we really perceive time, markings made with the vagaries of the heart.
On his travels through space, Billy Pilgrim asks the Tralfamadorians for something to read. Yes, they have books, but they tell Billy he wouldn’t understand them. The linear spine has been removed from their novels. Their books don’t contain a breadcrumb trail of clues or a convenient A-to-B trajectory. Rather, they are pools that churn with overlapping layers of events and time. The Tralfamadorians tell Billy what they love about their books “are the depths of the many marvelous moments seen all at once.”
A school morning, winter dark upon the windows. The sun yet to rise. I’m knotting my tie as I roust my son. “Time to get up, bud.” He’s sleepy, his waking moments sluggish, payback for his night-owl ways. Years ago, we developed a ritual, the invitation of a piggyback ride to the breakfast table. I ask; he says yes. Another ritual—the offer of a countdown. “Ten seconds?” I ask. “Fifteen?”
He rubs his eyes. “Is twenty OK?”
I begin, the count altered to include his latest fascination, the history of pandemics. “Twenty . . . nineteen-eighteen was the year of the Spanish Flu . . . seventeen . . . sixteen . . . fifteen . . . fourteen . . . thirteen forty-seven was when the Black Plague hit Italy . . . twelve . . . eleven . . .”
He rises like a boxer off the canvas, covers tossed aside, and leaps onto my waiting back. He is eleven, lean yet solid. He can hold a plank longer than me. He has a knack for running, light steps and a tireless engine, and on our jogs, he’s now the one now must loop back. A balance has shifted, a tide of strength destined to grow. We go down the steps. I joke that our days for such rides are numbered, that someday he may be the one carrying me. He is warm against me, his breath, his body.
We have made this trek a thousand times. Here, I understand a little more about the beauty of the Tralfamadorian novel, the wonder of wading into a past that hits all at once. This house, this stairwell, my son on my back. This indulgence. This embrace. The vision of one time as all time and a heart so full.
*
Einstein’s theories revolutionized the science of time. Consider this scenario.
A clock runs on a source of regular rhythm. A pendulum’s sway. A current. A wound spring. Imagine a clock run by a ball bouncing between two plates. Each strike represents a second. The ball travels in a perfectly straight path.
Now set this device in motion. The ball continues to bounce, but the plates are moving and so is the ball, the whole system hurtling faster and faster. The ball now moves like this—
Pythagoras taught us about such distances, the hypotenuse’s greater length. The ball’s path stretches between plate-strikes. Speed elongates the seconds. Time expands. This is the science behind science fiction’s speed-of-light narratives, the space traveler returning to an aged earth.
Time, at least theoretically, is relative, flexible. Or in the case of Billy Pilgrim, broken.
*
“We went to the New York World’s Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
*
In his account of the Battle of Marathon, the Greek historian Herodutus writes of Epizelus, an Athenian warrior who, despite suffering no physical injury, fell permanently blind after the soldier standing beside him was slain. Herodutus also writes of a Spartan named Aristodemus, a man so shaken by his battlefield experiences that he was given the nickname “The Trembler.” Aristodemus, shamed by this un-Spartan-like betrayal of his humanity, hanged himself.
*
So it goes.
Here is Slaughterhouse-Five’s sad refrain, three words that have twined their way into our language. The phrase appears over a hundred times, a period to every reference of death. The water in a glass is dead. So it goes. A hundred thousand human beings burn. So it goes. With its repetition, the saying achieves an unsettling duality, both dulling and highlighting the carnage. Billy Pilgrim adopted the saying from his interstellar abductors. The Tralfamadorians, upon seeing a corpse, viewed it not as gone forever but, in the current moment, as a body in bad condition. They claimed death was not a period but just another event in the Mobius strip of time.
The morning after the raids on Dresden, Billy Pilgrim stepped out of the slaughterhouse. I can picture the scene only as deeply as a man who hasn’t seen a corpse outside a hospital or funeral service. I can fill in the background with stock footage culled from documentaries and war movies. I can call upon my limited experiences of shock, but no, I can’t imagine emerging into a smoldering moonscape. I can’t imagine being just a few years out of high school—a child in a children’s crusade—and burying the women and children and old men that my side, the side God was supposed to be on, had killed. In this light, So it goes transcends a simple saying. So it goes is a cloak, a suit of armor, a protection against the nightmare of war and one’s—no matter how distant—culpability in the deed.
Having reached my mid-fifties, I am a decade older than Kurt Vonnegut when he wrote his Dresden novel. I have buried family members and friends, but fortune has spared me the sufferings endured by so many. On Sunday mornings, I find myself looking over the obituaries, and I’m drawn to names I know—and to strangers my age or younger. The invisible hand is never far.
So it goes might offer comfort, but I don’t want to be robbed of death’s finality. I am twenty, maybe thirty years from my end. I cherish every day, but from this end of the continuum, I understand a lack of death would be cruel. There is beauty in a story’s resolution. The years pass, and as I age, I view death as both the end and a sounding board. A relayer of echoes, of heartbeats and sighs and the steps of my march. Here is my only wish—let me keep my eyes open until I can bear to watch no more.
*
The Gospel of Matthew tells the story of Herod the Great who, fearing the Magi’s prediction of the arrival of the newborn King of the Jews, ordered the death of all male children in Bethlehem. Biblical scholars refer to this as “The Massacre of the Innocents.” In 1914, at the First Battle of Ypres, over 25,000 student volunteers fresh from the Fatherland’s universities were cut down. The Germans named the First Ypres “Kindermord bei Ypren,” the “massacre of the innocents at Ypres.”
In 1645, an estimated 800,000 were slaughtered in the Yangzhou Massacre. Qing troops, under the command of Prince Dodo, conducted the killings as retribution for the city’s resistance. Wang Xiuchu, an eyewitness to the massacre wrote: “The women were bound together at the necks with a heavy rope, clustered like a string of pearls, stumbling with each step, and all of their bodies covered in mud. Babies lay everywhere on the ground. The organs of those trampled like turf under horses’ hooves or people’s feet were smeared in the dirt, and the crying of those still alive filled the whole outdoors.” The Yangzhou Massacre of 1645 shouldn’t be confused with the Yangzhou Massacre of 760. Different perpetrators, different targets.
The penchant for slaughter obviously outstrips our ability to provide each with a distinct name. So it goes.
*
Consider these three theories of time and reality.
Presentism—Only that which exists now is real. The future isn’t real. The past isn’t real unless there is something in the present to make it true. Being alive to witness this moment is the only way to ensure something is real. Don’t blink!
A Growing-Past—The present is real, of course, but so is the past, and the past grows with each second-hand tick. The future—totally unreal. Too much chaos. Too many possibilities. Who knows? Who ever knows?
Eternalism—Adherents of eternalism object to the ontological status of the past, present, or the future. Yes, they believe in the reality of these concepts, but there is no metaphysical difference between them. The delineation between past, present, and future lies in perception, a subjective classification that varies from person to person.
“Ah,” say the Tralfamadorians, “now you’re starting to make sense.”
*
I am sixteen, and I’m spending the weekend at my brother’s college. 1976 is in full swing—flared jeans, denim caps, tight shirts with colors and schemes reminiscent of mankind’s hippest mode of transportation, the tricked-out van. Behind us, an afternoon of basketball in the campus gym, a trip to the cafeteria. Later, I will be adopted at a party—the youngster hanging with an increasingly rowdy crew, the room cheering me on as I crack another Pabst tallboy. Later still, after puffing my first and only clove cigarette, I will end the night kneeling on a slimy bathroom floor, a cartoonish orbit of stars around my spinning head.
But now I’m in a hall claimed by the student government for movie night. This space once the dining room in Old Main, and around us the ghosts of generations who wouldn’t dream of attending dinner without a suit coat or dress. In two years, I will filter around this room, searching for department tables and amassing computer punch cards as I register for classes. In six years, I’ll be here to attend my induction into Kappa Delta Pi. But all of that waits in a future that is now my past.
Folding chairs are arranged in haphazard clumps. I claim a spot near the front and sit on the floor. The 16mm projectors rest on a cart in the floor’s center. The lights go out, and soon, a faint, flowery thread of smoke drifts from the bathroom. Dust motes tumble through the projector’s beam. The cogs clunk and chug, the stammer of the film’s shaking loop. On the screen, a scarecrow wrapped in a blanket stumbles through the snow. Here is Billy Pilgrim, lost behind enemy lines.
Hooray for the movies of the 70’s, their grittiness, their antiheroes, their questioning of the American Dream. Here was my time coming up, and as a youngster, I could walk to four different theaters. In those darkened caves, surrounded by a sense of space and openness lost to today’s multiplexes, I snuck in to see age-restricted fare. The Godfather. Papillon. Dog Day Afternoon. The Conversation. Network. The Last Detail. Harry and Tonto. The Exorcist. Taxi Driver. More.
The movie version of Slaughterhouse-Five was released in 1972. George Roy Hill directed. Michael Sacks played Billy Pilgrim. Valerie Perrine played Montana Wildhack. Glenn Gould, an artist whose CD I would later play nightly for my son as he drifted in his crib, performed the music. Vonnegut claimed post-war Dresden reminded him of Dayton, Ohio, and in the absence of the original, the pre-destruction Dresden scenes were shot in Prague. The film was awarded a Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize. Vonnegut, in his preface to Between Time and Timbuktu, called the film “a flawless translation.” The sixteen year old watched, rapt by the images that, until that moment, had played only in his head.
Fast forward and thirty-eight years have passed since I watched the film’s snowy opening scene. Beside me, my son. Slaughterhouse-Five, delivered in a little red envelope, plays on our DVD. My son is a student of history, a keen observer. He knows about the Battle of the Bulge, the RAF’s night raids, the Lancasters and their incendiary bombs, the target flares the Germans called Christmas trees. We settle in. We won’t watch much—there is homework to do and a dog to walk. There is a nude scene I don’t want him to see—but I do want him to experience the beginning. I want him to see another view of war, a perspective of what it’s like to be scared and lost, a man-child with his boots full of snow.
*
In science, there are physical and chemical changes. Burning is a chemical change, a breakdown at the molecular level. Death for many burning victims comes from carbon monoxide poisoning, another type of drowning, the lungs robbed of oxygen. Victims will often suffer painful convulsions and respiratory arrest before losing consciousness. If the CO levels are lower, the victim will die of heatstroke, shock, blood loss, or the thermal decomposition of organs. Bones crack beneath the heat.
A firestorm is created when the flames grow to the point where their heat draws in the surrounding air. Small fires merge into a single, rising column. A tornado of flames. The destruction carried on gale-force winds.
The Dresden firestorm consumed eight square miles of the city. Imagine Manhattan. Now erase every building and living thing south of Central Park.
*
Nobody talked much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing appropriate to say. One thing was clear: Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the design. There were to be no moon men at all.
*
Lot’s wife turned back, disobeying God, and for this, she was turned to a pillar of salt. As a child, I imagined this in literal of terms, an image rooted in the sensibilities of comic books. Vonnegut puts Lot’s wife at the end of the first chapter. Here, he professes his love for her humanness. He tells us people aren’t supposed to look back. He calls his book a failure because it was written by a pillar of salt.
Fortunately, I was allowed to grow beyond childhood, and I, too, harbor a fondness for Lot’s wife. Hers wasn’t an act of defiance but of fear, of shock. Of mercy. She turned back because she needed to see the horror to make it real. Perhaps I would have looked back as well. I would have needed vision’s understanding. I would have needed to inventory what I’d lost before I could move ahead. I would have become another pillar of salt.
*
The Third Punic War was the last stage in the titanic struggle between Rome and Carthage over control of the Mediterranean world. The Roman commander Scipio oversaw the nearly three-year siege of Carthage. Behind the city walls, thousands starved. The final Roman onslaught killed thousands more, a house-to-house fight, the streets running red. The 50,000 Carthaginians who survived were either slaughtered or sold into slavery. The Romans then systematically burned the city. Legend contends Scipio ordered the land sown with salt so nothing would grow there ever again.
*
A memory—I’m a college freshman. Behind the art building, blackened letters stretch across the lawn. I step closer and smile. The message: SALT BURNS GRASS.
Perhaps Lot’s wife lived, but inside, she was filled with salt, burned and hollowed and dead.
*
In 1908, John McTaggart published his influential essay “The Unreality of Time.” He proposed two ways of considering time—the A-series and B-series. A-theorists believe in the concept of presentism or, to a degree, the growing past. The A’s ask one to picture time as a continual parade of past, present, and future—a world as thoroughly tensed as our language—was, is, and will be. An event was once in the unknowable future passes through the tangible and real present. It slips into the past, a process that causes it to both disappear and become forever preserved. To the A-crowd, what matters is the objective now. Only in the present can we flex our muscles. Only in the present can we be kind. Only in the present can we create art or make love. Only in the present can we alter our world.
McTaggart’s B-theory runs on a simpler language. In their embrace of eternalism, the B’s have abandoned those pesky verb tenses. Time, they contend, is a man-made scaffolding which allows the assignment of order to the orderless. It is an invention, just like the wheel or lever, a tool that has served us well, but still an artificial conceit. The only flow time possesses is that which we see in our thoughts. Past, present, and future are real—all at once, right now—just as they have been since man’s first flicker of awareness.
Unlike Billy Pilgrim, the B-theorists just might enjoy checking out a few Tralfamadorian novels.
*
“The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
—Albert Einstein
*
We go to the beach in the summers we don’t have a major expense—a new car, a dead furnace. A few days, the sea air, the sun. The cool sting of outdoor showers. We absorb ourselves in the rhythms and entertain the lazy dream of staying all year, but the notion is fleeting. I’m a woods person, and I would miss my hills and trees and the windings of rocky paths. A ritual—a final walk along the beach. The car packed, the rental property cleaned. Ahead, the drive home. The traffic. The aspirin I’ll take to appease my aching back.
My wife and son and I watch the waves. Their width, their endless march. The surf fans across the sloped shore, and beneath the foam, a tumbling of pebbles and broken shells. My footprints disappear beneath the next push. Not so long ago, I didn’t enjoy the beach. I was fidgety, unable to find comfort. My mind raced—the calling of tasks and projects, the outsider’s dissonance in my thoughts, the connection that came easily to others lost on me. This perspective, like so many others, changed with my son. I found my place holding his hand at the continent’s edge. Together, we ventured into the breakers, and when he gathered his courage, he let go of my hand. Down he’d go, sometimes lost beneath water as gray as concrete, before popping up. My heart spiked, then settled until his next tumble.
Another perspective shift—the losing of my fear of water. In my late thirties, I learned to swim, and with a new confidence, I ventured beyond the breakers. The shelf dropped, and I bobbed upon the swells, enjoying a calm I hadn’t expected, my thoughts singular and blissfully focused on nothing beyond the next wave and the decision to rise with the crest or ride to the shore. I stayed until my son waved me in or I grew too tired or cold. Dripping, I walked the wet sand, the ocean’s rhythm still in me, shivers in my muscles. I lay on my towel. The warmth returned. I listened to the waves, the umbrellas’ breeze-whipped canvas, the gulls, and I found myself thankful for the gift of change, the gift of having another year to understand what I hadn’t before.
My son tosses a final shell into the waves. We’ve walked farther than I’d imagined, the lifeguard posts and beach umbrellas toying with my perspective. A gull hovers, motionless on the breeze. A little girl lowers a pink bucket into the surf. The waves roll in, break, retreat. We’ll return next year or the year after that. My son will be taller, stronger, and if I’m fortunate, I will have faded in all the expected ways. We will return, again and again. Then will come the summer I am gone.
Hello. Farewell. Hello. Farewell. This is what the waves sing. Billy Pilgrim echoes this Tralfamadorian saying before he’s struck by an assassin’s bullet. Hello, farewell—as steady as my pulse, and here is the rhythm of our days. The hellos of reunion, the first glimpses of the newborns and lovers who will fill our hearts. The farewells that bring tears and the empty spaces never to be filled.
It’s time to go. From atop the dunes, we turn for a final look. The wide vista. The long lines of breakers. The horizon’s kiss of sea and sky. Hello. Farewell. Hello.
*
“And Nietzsche, with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said that the life we lived we’re going to live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.”
—Woody Allen
*
Not so long ago our world was full of time travelers!
A person riding the transcontinental railroad in the 1870’s would, if they cared to be in synch with their surroundings, have to adjust their pocket watch hundreds of times. A minute forward here, three back there, each county and city keepers of their own official clock. This lackadaisical attitude didn’t sit well with Cornelius Vanderbilt and the other railroad barons, their empires built on making connections and the shipment of goods. On November 18, 1883, time zones were established across the United States, and the following year, at an international gathering in Washington DC, the world was segmented into twenty-four time zones. Welcome globalization!
The businessmen of the world set their clocks accordingly. The tribesmen of the vanishing wilderness turned their eyes to the sun, just as their ancestors had.
*
The end of the 1950’s saw Vonnegut at a pivotal point of his career. He’d already put out Player Piano, was about to publish Sirens of Titan, and was in the midst of his long struggle with Cat’s Cradle. He’d made decent money from his stories, the heady days of Colliers and Saturday Evening Post and a half dozen other magazines that could keep a writer with a young family afloat, if not rich. He was penning plays and enjoying the process, but his theater work hadn’t received the recognition he’d hoped. He dabbled in movie scripts, sculpture. He pitched a military-themed board game to uninterested toy companies. He took a teaching job with troubled boys but quit after a semester. He claimed he struggled with writer’s block, but his work kept coming. Perhaps his condition just felt like writer’s block, his Dresden book still inside, pushing, gnawing, waiting to take form.
In a 1959 letter to Knox Burger, an early publisher of Vonnegut’s stories and longtime mentor and friend, Vonnegut wrote: “And tell me—when one is being frog-marched by life, does one giggle or does one try to maintain as much dignity as possible under the circumstances?”
I’ve got to believe Kurt Vonnegut already knew the answer. I see it written in Player Piano and Sirens of Titan and the stories he’d already published. And I see it waiting in Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Bluebeard, and a dozen others. Kurt Vonnegut believed in the dignity of laughter. Laughter, if not our most human gift, then a close second behind kindness and/or the magic of baby-making. Laughter made his characters walk a little taller. Laughter, like dignity, arose from courage, from looking one’s fears dead in the eye.
And “frog-marched”—one’s arms pinned behind one’s back, a convict’s walk and a rousting by greater powers. “Frog-marched by life”—how true. How sad and funny and true.
*
A beautiful afternoon, early November, autumn’s pale sky. We climb the church steps. On the entrance overhang, a gray statue, Saint Joan, her head bowed, her hands resting upon her sword’s pommel. Only a few inside, the space hushed and cavernous. My wife and son cross themselves. We pass slender columns of stained glass. Yesterday was my father’s birthday, our plans to come derailed by homework and a chance to sneak in a jog before the weekend’s projected cold snap. Last month we found my son in tears, sad because he both missed his grandfather and because he feared he’d soon no longer be able to remember the old man he’d loved so much. We’ve had this conversation before—how much joy my son brought to my father’s life, his last years enriched by this new relationship, how memories fade but also leave us with something deeper, a residue of the love we’ve given and shared—but for my son, the sense of grief seems set on an odd cycle, an emerging untethered to the logic of clocks and calendars. My father is, after all, the first person my son has lost.
We allow my son to light one of the few unclaimed candles. Flames burn in slender glasses, Veterans Day, a remembering of soldiers gone, and from the candles’ tiered racks, a heat I hadn’t anticipated. My son writes in the prayer book. My father’s name, a set of dates, US Army. We slide into a nearby pew. I’m not a religious man, yet I admire the faith that drives charity and brotherhood. I appreciate the beauty and security to be found in ritual, and as I kneel beside my family in this beautiful prism of stillness and colored light, I wonder if I should accept the story of a man sent to spread a message of love, not literally but as a veil that drapes a current so often covered beneath the spill of blood. I rise and settle into the pew. My son remains kneeling.
Vonnegut wasn’t a religious man, either. He was a humanist, an avowed free thinker. Yet a profound strain of compassion runs through his work, a foundation of empathy worthy of Jesus or any other benevolent deity. In The Sirens of Titan he writes, “A purpose of a human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” Here’s a quote that could just as easily come from the New Testament than from a novel about interplanetary invasion. Consider Billy Pilgrim. He is human, yes, but also a messenger from another world. He sleeps standing in the boxcar on the way to the POW camp, his arms outstretched to support himself, an outcast even among his sorry fellow travelers. He has walked through the garden and the wasteland. He is a martyr, his death preordained, a note in a larger scheme. Through his letters to newspapers, radio appearances, and speeches, he brings the world good news meant to ease death’s sting.
I too think about death, and without religion or the insight of extraterrestrials, I have no creed to soothe the trepidation that unknowing brings. I’d like to think I’m not afraid, but such statements come easily to a healthy man. Perhaps I will find God, perhaps not. Either way, I will stumble forward, making mistakes but trying not to make the same ones twice.
My wife and son rise, and together, the three of us exit the church. We have another hour of daylight. I’m happy to be here, to love these people who are around to be loved. We walk down the street, and I rest my hand upon my son’s shoulder. How, I wonder, will he remember all of this?
*
If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, “Kurt is up in heaven now.” That’s my favorite joke.
*
A cool Sunday, and my son and I ascend a steep passage along the Appalachian Trail. The leaves just past peak, and around us, the season’s grays and browns. Up we go, a switchback trail, the path narrow in spots, a drop off to one side, the empty air and the upper branches of trees. My son forges ahead. We’ve been hiking since he could walk, and I’m thankful for the gift of health that allows him to take the lead. Late fall and the hint of looming winter, the hush and the muted tones—here is my favorite time of year. The chill upon my face and the kindled heat beneath my jacket. An hour’s climb, the grade steep in spots, stones that serve as stairs. We reach the summit, a nub in a thousand-mile ridge, and rest upon a boulder larger than our house. The valley opens before us, the road we drove earlier a gray thread, the wide Susquehanna beyond, and above, circling hawks.
The Tralfamadorians chided Billy Pilgrim for his earthling’s habit of asking why. There was no why, they said. There simply is. Perhaps the Tralfamadorians were right. Perhaps why is a human luxury, an appropriation of brainpower freed from the caveman’s wiring of fight or flight. For much of my life I had difficulty enjoying myself. I could smile and laugh, but beneath, I often lapsed into contemplation. I wondered if I was truly happy or simply wearing its mask—and if I was happy, what were the components of happiness? How did happiness work? It took me years to understand that the happiness I yearned for wouldn’t be found at a party or a bar. The happiness I would cherish would be intimate. Solitary. Give me a blank page and a pen. Give me a hand to hold. Give me a trail to walk with my son. Give me the struggle of trying to comprehend what speaks to me. Why? I ask. Why?
Sometimes I wish I could read a cherished book again for the first time. The surprise, the freshness, the audacity of language, the beauty of making connections—they would once more be mine to experience. The first time I read Slaughterhouse-Five I had yet to kiss a girl. I had yet to suffer the loss of a loved one. The fifteen-year-old believed that through the sheer act of being, he would make the world sit up and notice. Today I am older. Humbled. Grateful to simply count myself among the living.
I shiver in the unblocked wind. My son has his own questions today, and we talk about whatever he likes. We sit upon the cold rocks. The two of us part of this beautiful scene. The two of us asking why.
*
“Time is the longest distance between two places.”
—Tennessee Williams
*
ABOVE YOU THE STEPS OF GIANTS THE TREMBLING EARTH YOU IN ITS BOWELS AND HOW CONVENIENT THAT YOU’VE LINED YOURSELF IN THIS TOMB YOUR HANDS OVER YOUR HEAD A RAIN OF PLASTER AND PAINT AND WHAT GOOD WOULD YOUR HUDDLED POSE DO IF THE CEILING CAVED THE TONS OF EARTH YOUR BURIAL COMPLETE BUT YOU HOLD THE POSE AN ABSURD REFLEX AS IF YOU HAVE ANY SAY-SO IN THIS NIGHTMARE AND THE SHAKING CONTINUES THE GIANTS ON THE MARCH THEIR STEPS NEAR THEN FAR THEN NEAR AGAIN AND YOU’RE TRAPPED IN THIS HOLLOW SPACE AND WITHIN YOU AN ECHOING OF OTHER HOLLOW SPACES PRIVATE SPACES AND NO ONE SLEEPS AND WHEN THE BARRAGE HALTS YOU GUESS IT’S DAWN ALTHOUGH YOU CAN’T BE SURE
*
I stand along the creek’s edge. A fifty-yard reach to the opposite shore, these past two days of rain. Silt and smooth stones underfoot, the white dotting of Asiatic clams. The shoreline with its curves and hollows. The fishermen’s trash. A length of gnarled siding wrapped around a tree, a reminder of last autumn’s floods. I throw stones, the Osages’ green balls. The current swift, my offerings short-lived. A splash. Gone.
Billy Pilgrim, through his interactions with benevolent aliens, came to see human life as liquid, a flowing state. To die is to stop flowing. So it goes. The greater stream flows on, and the droplets that evaporate into the atmosphere and the splashes that wash the shore mean nothing. The communal tide that claims us today flows on, and in its churning, part of us must remain. All those years of collisions and jostlings. The love and fights and kindnesses shared. The echoes of this kinetic dance.
The laws of chemistry state that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, and in this light, can a moment—a moment made of all that is concrete and tangible—really disappear? Perhaps this living second is another form of matter, at least in the deeply racked focus of the fourth dimension. Shift from the chemist to the physicist. He needs the past to exist; without its anchor, his attempts to calculate velocity and acceleration, growth and decay, would float off, lost in a world that couldn’t lay claim to its past.
I leave the water and make my way back to the trail. The flow behind me and within.
*
In 1937, between 9,000 and 20,000 Haitian Creoles were killed on the order of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trajillo. The murders were brutal—machetes and clubs. Men, women, children. Many bodies were cast into the Massacre River, a waterway named after an earlier ugliness between the Spanish and French. The bodies, bloated as the days passed, flowed to the sea.
How did two tribes who shared the same sunny island tell each other apart? Dominican solders were said to have carried sprigs of parsley and then ask suspected Haitian Creoles to pronounce its Spanish name, “perejil.” Those whose first language was Creole had difficulty saying the word, a fault of translation and phonics. Those who failed were cut down along with their families.
History has christened it “The Parsley Massacre.”
*
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
—Voltaire
*
I am twenty-five. It’s been a night of poor decisions, and now it’s after midnight, summer rain on the fields. Every so often, a lightning flash, white tendrils hotter than the sun, moments of illumination and then darkness again. The road, black and slick, disappears beneath our rushing headlights. My friend is in no condition to drive, but neither am I. Wind whips through the windows. We laugh at nothing, the stereo too loud. We come upon a sharp turn, a dogleg that no doubt dates back generations, a boundary between farms, a cattle path long paved over. We’re going too fast, the road too wet, and the truth of physics is born out—velocity, friction, deceleration, centripetal motion, our car turning then spinning. I see a farmhouse and barn, a swirling of dark pastures and distant lights.
We slide off the road, backend first, and not two feet from my window, a wide-trunked oak, close enough to touch, to smell. We come to a stop. My heart pounds. Our laughter is a reflex of shock and the starshine of adrenaline.
In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut and his war buddy Bernard O’Hare return to Dresden. There, they befriend a local taxi driver, a man whose mother was incinerated in the firestorm. The following Christmas, the taxi driver sends O’Hare a postcard that ends with: “I hope that we’ll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxicab if the accident will.”
If the accident will. Free will, that earthly concept that so perplexed the Tralfamadorians, is our gift, but free will’s power dwindles beside the impact of accidents. If the accident will our cell cycles won’t turn upon us and generate the tumor that spells the beginning of the end. If the accident will the lockdowns at our children’s schools will only be drills. If the accident will the trees our cars skid by won’t slam against our skulls, our brains scrambled and darkness forever. If the accident will—and I think of the separated-at-birth twins reunited as gray adults, the traveler who missed his flight on the airplane that went down in flames. So much depends upon if the accident will.
I look back, five decades, and as Billy Pilgrim’s mother asked, “How did I get so old?” The years stretch behind me, my memories fading at a rate beyond the quantifying powers of mathematicians. I have lived one life, and in each moment, I have made one decision, and thus, from the vantage point of a man closer to death than he’d like to admit, my days appear as single path. There are turns, yes, loops and double-backs, yet my perception of the fourth dimension constricts me from seeing it otherwise.
Consider our actions, our actual physical doings, as a kind of electric charge. String these together and behold the arc of our lives, a lightning bolt across the sky, yet beneath this illuminated heartbeat there exist a million filaments left dark, the branching nexus of choices unmade, the routes untraveled. All is not the will of accidents, yet so much is accidental, and another image comes to mind, the popular game of pachinko, which in this context, might look like this—
*
Famous accidental discoveries—Velcro, Viagra, dynamite, the Slinky, LSD, Teflon, the X-ray, the microwave, corn flakes.
*
Listen to the Tralfamadorian advise Billy Pilgrim on the nature of human suffering: “Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.” The message is seductive, its peace, its acceptance. The words flow, a simple mantra, a balm no different than man’s other balms. His religions. His delusions and distractions. His powders and spirits.
I also enjoy pretty things, but I can’t look at them all the time. Neither does Vonnegut. Consider all the pretty things he offers for our viewing. The corpse mines of Dresden. The candles made from the fat of slaughtered Jews. The dead eyes of Russian prisoners. Billy’s breakdowns, his estrangement from his children. The Tralfamadorians, with their passivity and denial of free will, bring us a mindset every bit as culpable as the Nazis and Bomber Command and all the other bearers of self-justified horror, all of them cousins in groupthink and willful blindness. In total war, one’s enemies sink to the subhuman. They are vermin, worthy only of extermination. The Tralfamadorians, beyond hate yet caught in their shallow realm of pretty things, are simply indifferent. Perpetrator or bystander—either way, the butchery continues.
So give me my pretty things, but don’t withhold the sad. Give me the sorrows that will help me savor the days when all is well. Give me the miseries that will break me with the sting of melancholy. Give me the beauty only a heavy heart can understand. And if the accident will, let me be strong enough to see another day.
*
