Cat's Cradle (7 page)

“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 that 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.

O
N THE WAY BACK
to the hotel I caught sight of Jack’s Hobby Shop, the place where Franklin Hoenikker had worked. I told the cab driver to stop and wait.

I went in and found Jack himself presiding over his teeny-weeny fire engines, railroad trains, airplanes, boats, houses, lampposts, trees, tanks, rockets, automobiles, porters, conductors, policemen, firemen, mommies,
daddies, cats, dogs, chickens, soldiers, ducks, and cows. He was a cadaverous man, a serious man, a dirty man, and he coughed a lot.

“What kind of a boy was Franklin Hoenikker?” he echoed, and he coughed and coughed. He shook his head, and he showed me that he adored Frank as much as he’d ever adored anybody. “That isn’t a question I have to answer with words. I can
show
you what kind of a boy Franklin Hoenikker was.” He coughed. “You can look,” he said, “and you can judge for yourself.”

And he took me down into the basement of his store. He lived down there. There was a double bed and a dresser and a hot plate.

Jack apologized for the unmade bed. “My wife left me a week ago.” He coughed. “I’m still trying to pull the strings of my life back together.”

And then he turned on a switch, and the far end of the basement was filled with a blinding light.

We approached the light and found that it was sunshine to a fantastic little country built on plywood, an island as perfectly rectangular as a township in Kansas. Any restless soul, any soul seeking to find what lay beyond its green boundaries, really would fall off the edge of the world.

The details were so exquisitely in scale, so cunningly textured and tinted, that it was unnecessary for me to squint in order to believe that the nation was real—the hills, the lakes, the rivers, the forests, the
towns, and all else that good natives everywhere hold so dear.

And everywhere ran a spaghetti pattern of railroad tracks.

“Look at the doors of the houses,” said Jack reverently.

“Neat. Keen.”

“They’ve got real knobs on ’em, and the knockers really work.”

“God.”

“You ask what kind of a boy Franklin Hoenikker was; he built this.” Jack choked up.

“All by himself?”

“Oh, I helped some, but anything I did was according to his plans. That kid was a genius.”

“How could anybody argue with you?”

“His kid brother was a midget, you know.”

“I know.”

“He did some of the soldering underneath.”

“It sure looks real.”

“It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t done overnight, either.”

“Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

“That kid didn’t have any home life, you know.”

“I’ve heard.”

“This was his real home. Thousands of hours he spent down here. Sometimes he wouldn’t even run the trains; just sit and look, the way we’re doing.”

“There’s a lot to see. It’s practically like a trip to
Europe, there are so many things to see, if you look close.”

“He’d see things you and I wouldn’t see. He’d all of a sudden tear down a hill that would look just as real as any hill you ever saw—to you and me. And he’d be right, too. He’d put a lake where that hill had been and a trestle over the lake, and it would look ten times as good as it did before.”

“It isn’t a talent everybody has.”

“That’s right!” said Jack passionately. The passion cost him another coughing fit. When the fit was over, his eyes were watering copiously. “Listen, I told that kid he should go to college and study some engineering so he could go to work for American Flyer or somebody like that—somebody big, somebody who’d really back all the ideas he had.”

“Looks to me as if you backed him a good deal.”

“Wish I had, wish I could have,” mourned Jack. “I didn’t have the capital. I gave him stuff whenever I could, but most of this stuff he bought out of what he earned working upstairs for me. He didn’t spend a dime on anything but this—didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t go to movies, didn’t go out with girls, wasn’t car crazy.”

“This country could certainly use a few more of those.”

Jack shrugged. “Well … I guess the Florida gangsters got him. Afraid he’d talk.”

“Guess they did.”

Jack suddenly broke down and cried. “I wonder if those dirty sons of bitches,” he sobbed, “have any idea what it was they killed!”

D
URING MY TRIP
to Ilium and to points beyond— a two-week expedition bridging Christmas—I let a poor poet named Sherman Krebbs have my New York City apartment free. My second wife had left me on the grounds that I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with.

Krebbs was a bearded man, a platinum blond Jesus with spaniel eyes. He was no close friend of mine. I had met him at a cocktail party where he presented himself as National Chairman of Poets and Painters for Immediate Nuclear War. He begged for shelter, not necessarily bomb proof, and it happened that I had some.

When I returned to my apartment, still twanging with the puzzling spiritual implications of the unclaimed stone angel in Ilium, I found my apartment wrecked by a nihilistic debauch. Krebbs was gone; but,
before leaving, he had run up three-hundred-dollars’ worth of long-distance calls, set my couch on fire in five places, killed my cat and my avocado tree, and torn the door off my medicine cabinet.

He wrote this poem, in what proved to be excrement, on the yellow linoleum floor of my kitchen:

There was another message, written in lipstick in a feminine hand on the wallpaper over my bed. It said: “No, no, no, said Chicken-licken.”

There was a sign hung around my dead cat’s neck. It said, “Meow.”

I have not seen Krebbs since. Nonetheless, I sense that he was my
Karass
. If he was, he served it as a
wrang-wrang
. A
wrang-wrang
, according to Bokonon, is a person who steers people away from a line of speculation by reducing that line, with the example of the
wrang-wrang’s
own life, to an absurdity.

I might have been vaguely inclined to dismiss the stone angel as meaningless, and to go from there to the meaninglessness of all. But after I saw what Krebbs had done, in particular what he had done to my sweet cat, nihilism was not for me.

Somebody or something did not wish me to be a nihilist. It was Krebbs’s mission, whether he knew it or not, to disenchant me with that philosophy. Well done, Mr. Krebbs, well done.

A
ND THEN, ONE DAY
, one Sunday, I found out where the fugitive from justice, the model-maker, the Great God Jehovah and Beelzebub of bugs in Mason jars was—where Franklin Hoenikker could be found.

He was alive!

The news was in a special supplement to the New York
Sunday Times
. The supplement was a paid ad for a banana republic. On its cover was the profile of the most heart-breakingly beautiful girl I ever hope to see.

Beyond the girl, bulldozers were knocking down palm trees, making a broad avenue. At the end of the avenue were the steel skeletons of three new buildings.

“The Republic of San Lorenzo,” said the copy on the cover, “on the move! A healthy, happy, progressive,
freedom-loving, beautiful nation makes itself extremely attractive to American investors and tourists alike.”

I was in no hurry to read the contents. The girl on the cover was enough for me—more than enough, since I had fallen in love with her on sight. She was very young and very grave, too—and luminously compassionate and wise.

She was as brown as chocolate. Her hair was like golden flax.

Her name was Mona Aamons Monzano, the cover said. She was the adopted daughter of the dictator of the island.

I opened the supplement, hoping for more pictures of this sublime mongrel Madonna.

I found instead a portrait of the island’s dictator, Miguel “Papa” Monzano, a gorilla in his late seventies.

Next to “Papa’s” portrait was a picture of a narrow-shouldered, fox-faced, immature young man. He wore a snow white military blouse with some sort of jeweled sunburst hanging on it. His eyes were close together; they had circles under them. He had apparently told barbers all his life to shave the sides and back of his head, but to leave the top of his hair alone. He had a wiry pompadour, a sort of cube of hair, marcelled, that arose to an incredible height.

This unattractive child was identified as Major General Franklin Hoenikker,
Minister of Science and Progress in the Republic of San Lorenzo
.

He was twenty-six years old.

S
AN LORENZO
was fifty miles long and twenty miles wide, I learned from the supplement to the New York
Sunday Times
. Its population was four hundred, fifty thousand souls, “… all fiercely dedicated to the ideals of the Free World.”

Its highest point. Mount McCabe, was eleven thousand feet above sea level. Its capital was Bolivar, “… a strikingly modern city built on a harbor capable of sheltering the entire United States Navy.” The principal exports were sugar, coffee, bananas, indigo, and handcrafted novelties.