Cat's Cradle (8 page)

“And sports fishermen recognize San Lorenzo as the unchallenged barracuda capital of the world.”

I wondered how Franklin Hoenikker, who had never even finished high school, had got himself such a fancy job. I found a partial answer in an essay on San Lorenzo that was signed by “Papa” Monzano.

“Papa” said that Frank was the architect of the “San Lorenzo Master Plan,” which included new roads, rural electrification, sewage-disposal plants, hotels, hospitals, clinics, railroads—the works. And, though the essay was brief and tightly edited, “Papa”
referred to Frank five times as: “… the
blood son
of Dr. Felix Hoenikker.”

The phrase reeked of cannibalism.

“Papa” plainly felt that Frank was a chunk of the old man’s magic meat.

A
LITTLE MORE LIGHT
was shed by another essay in the supplement, a florid essay titled, “What San Lorenzo Has Meant to One American.” It was almost certainly ghost-written. It was signed by Major General Franklin Hoenikker.

In the essay, Frank told of being all alone on a nearly swamped sixty-eight-foot Chris-Craft in the Caribbean. He didn’t explain what he was doing on it or how he happened to be alone. He did indicate, though, that his point of departure had been Cuba.

“The luxurious pleasure craft was going down, and my meaningless life with it,” said the essay. “All I’d eaten for four days was two biscuits and a sea gull. The dorsal fins of man-eating sharks were cleaving the
warm seas around me, and needle-teethed barracuda were making those waters boil.

“I raised my eyes to my Maker, willing to accept whatever His decision might be. And my eyes alit on a glorious mountain peak above the clouds. Was this Fata Morgana—the cruel deception of a mirage?”

I looked up Fata Morgana at this point in my reading; learned that it was, in fact, a mirage named after Morgan le Fay, a fairy who lived at the bottom of a lake. It was famous for appearing in the Strait of Messina, between Calabria and Sicily. Fata Morgana was poetic crap, in short.

What Frank saw from his sinking pleasure craft was not cruel Fata Morgana, but the peak of Mount McCabe. Gentle seas then nuzzled Frank’s pleasure craft to the rocky shores of San Lorenzo, as though God wanted him to go there.

Frank stepped ashore, dry shod, and asked where he was. The essay didn’t say so, but the son of a bitch had a piece of
ice-nine
with him—in a thermos jug.

Frank, having no passport, was put in jail in the capital city of Bolivar. He was visited there by “Papa” Monzano, who wanted to know if it were possible that Frank was a blood relative of the immortal Dr. Felix Hoenikker.

“I admitted I was,” said Frank in the essay. “Since that moment, every door to opportunity in San Lorenzo has been opened wide to me.”

A
S IT HAPPENED
—“As it was
supposed
to happen,” Bokonon would say—I was assigned by a magazine to do a story in San Lorenzo. The story wasn’t to be about “Papa” Monzano or Frank. It was to be about Julian Castle, an American sugar millionaire who had, at the age of forty, followed the example of Dr. Albert Schweitzer by founding a free hospital in a jungle, by devoting his life to miserable folk of another race.

Castle’s hospital was called the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle. Its jungle was on San Lorenzo, among the wild coffee trees on the northern slope of Mount McCabe.

When I flew to San Lorenzo, Julian Castle was sixty years old.

He had been absolutely unselfish for twenty years.

In his selfish days he had been as familiar to tabloid readers as Tommy Manville, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Barbara Hutton. His fame had rested on lechery, alcoholism, reckless driving, and draft evasion. He had had a dazzling talent for spending millions without increasing mankind’s stores of anything but chagrin.

He had been married five times, had produced one son.

The one son, Philip Castle, was the manager and owner of the hotel at which I planned to stay. The hotel was called the Casa Mona and was named after Mona Aamons Monzano, the blonde Negro on the cover of the supplement to the New York
Sunday Times
. The Casa Mona was brand new; it was one of the three new buildings in the background of the supplement’s portrait of Mona.

While I didn’t feel that purposeful seas were wafting me to San Lorenzo, I did feel that love was doing the job. The Fata Morgana, the mirage of what it would be like to be loved by Mona Aamons Monzano, had become a tremendous force in my meaningless life. I imagined that she could make me far happier than any woman had so far succeeded in doing.

T
HE SEATING
on the airplane, bound ultimately for San Lorenzo from Miami, was three and three. As it happened—“As it was
supposed
to happen”—my seat-mates were Horlick Minton, the new American Ambassador to the Republic of San Lorenzo, and his wife, Claire. They were white-haired, gentle, and frail.

Minton told me that he was a career diplomat, holding the rank of Ambassador for the first time. He and his wife had so far served, he told me, in Bolivia, Chile, Japan, France, Yugoslavia, Egypt, the Union of South Africa, Liberia, and Pakistan.

They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by. They were, I think, a flawless example of what Bokonon calls a
duprass
, which is a
karass
composed of only two persons.

“A true
duprass
,” Bokonon tells us, “can’t be invaded, not even by children born of such a union.”

I exclude the Mintons, therefore, from my own
karass
, from Frank’s
karass
, from Newt’s
karass
, from
Asa Breed’s
karass
, from Angela’s
karass
, from Lyman Enders Knowles’s
karass
, from Sherman Krebbs’s
karass
. The Mintons’
karass
was a tidy one, composed of only two.

“I should think you’d be very pleased,” I said to Minton.

“What should I be pleased about?”

“Pleased to have the rank of Ambassador.”

From the pitying way Minton and his wife looked at each other, I gathered that I had said a fat-headed thing. But they humored me. “Yes,” winced Minton, “I’m very pleased.” He smiled wanly. “I’m
deeply
honored.”

And so it went with almost every subject I brought up. I couldn’t make the Mintons bubble about anything.

For instance: “I suppose you can speak a lot of languages,” I said.

“Oh, six or seven—between us,” said Minton.

“That must be very gratifying.”

“What must?”

“Being able to speak to people of so many different nationalities.”

“Very gratifying,” said Minton emptily.

“Very gratifying,” said his wife.

And they went back to reading a fat, typewritten manuscript that was spread across the chair arm between them.

“Tell me,” I said a little later, “in all your wide
travels, have you found people everywhere about the same at heart?”

“Hm?” asked Minton.

“Do you find people to be about the same at heart, wherever you go?”

He looked at his wife, making sure she had heard the question, then turned back to me. “About the same, wherever you go,” he agreed.

“Um,” I said.

Bokonon tells us, incidentally, that members of a
duprass
always die within a week of each other. When it came time for the Mintons to die, they did it within the same second.

T
HERE WAS A SMALL SALOON
in the rear of the plane and I repaired there for a drink. It was there that I met another fellow American, H. Lowe Crosby of Evanston, Illinois, and his wife, Hazel.

They were heavy people, in their fifties. They spoke twangingly. Crosby told me that he owned a
bicycle factory in Chicago, that he had had nothing but ingratitude from his employees. He was going to move his business to grateful San Lorenzo.

“You know San Lorenzo well?” I asked.

“This’ll be the first time I’ve ever seen it, but everything I’ve heard about it I like,” said H. Lowe Crosby. “They’ve got discipline. They’ve got something you can count on from one year to the next. They don’t have the government encouraging everybody to be some kind of original pissant nobody ever heard of before.”

“Sir?”

“Christ, back in Chicago, we don’t make bicycles any more. It’s all human relations now. The eggheads sit around trying to figure out new ways for everybody to be happy. Nobody can get fired, no matter what; and if somebody does accidentally make a bicycle, the union accuses us of cruel and inhuman practices and the government confiscates the bicycle for back taxes and gives it to a blind man in Afghanistan.”

“And you think things will be better in San Lorenzo?”

“I know damn well they will be. The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!”

Crosby asked me what my name was and what my business was. I told him, and his wife Hazel recognized my name as an Indiana name. She was from Indiana, too.

“My God,” she said, “are you a
Hoosier?”

I admitted I was.

“I’m a Hoosier, too,” she crowed. “Nobody has to be ashamed of being a Hoosier.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I never knew anybody who was.”

“Hoosiers do all right. Lowe and I’ve been around the world twice, and everywhere we went we found Hoosiers in charge of everything.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“You know the manager of that new hotel in Istanbul?”

“No.”

“He’s a Hoosier. And the military-whatever-he-is in Tokyo …”

“Attaché,” said her husband.

“He’s a Hoosier,” said Hazel. “And the new Ambassador to Yugoslavia …”

“A Hoosier?” I asked.

“Not only him, but the Hollywood Editor of
Life
magazine, too. And that man in Chile …”

“A Hoosier, too?”

“You can’t go anywhere a
Hoosier
hasn’t made his mark,” she said.

“The man who wrote
Ben Hur
was a Hoosier.”

“And James Whitcomb Riley.”

“Are you from Indiana, too?” I asked her husband.

“Nope. I’m a Prairie Stater. ‘Land of Lincoln,’ as they say.”

“As far as that goes,” said Hazel triumphantly, “Lincoln was a Hoosier, too. He grew up in Spencer County.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I don’t know what it is about Hoosiers,” said Hazel, “but they’ve sure got something. If somebody was to make a list, they’d be amazed.”

“That’s true,” I said.

She grasped me firmly by the arm. “We Hoosiers got to stick together.”

“Right.”

“You call me ‘Mom.’”

“What?”

“Whenever I meet a young Hoosier, I tell them, ‘You call me
Mom.’”

“Uh huh.”

“Let me hear you say it,” she urged.

“Mom?”

She smiled and let go of my arm. Some piece of clockwork had completed its cycle. My calling Hazel “Mom” had shut it off, and now Hazel was rewinding it for the next Hoosier to come along.

Hazel’s obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false
karass
, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a
granfalloon
. Other examples of
granfalloons
are the
Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere.

As Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:

H
. L
OWE
C
ROSBY
was of the opinion that dictatorships were often very good things. He wasn’t a terrible person and he wasn’t a fool. It suited him to confront the world with a certain barnyard clownish-ness, but many of the things he had to say about undisciplined mankind were not only funny but true.

The major point at which his reason and his sense of humor left him was when he approached the question of what people were really supposed to do with their time on Earth.

He believed firmly that they were meant to build bicycles for him.

“I hope San Lorenzo is every bit as good as you’ve heard it is,” I said.

“I only have to talk to one man to find out if it is or not,” he said. “When ‘Tapa’ Monzano gives his word of honor about anything on that little island, that’s it. That’s how it is; that’s how it’ll be.”

“The thing I like,” said Hazel, “is they all speak English and they’re all Christians. That makes things so much easier.”

“You know how they deal with crime down there?” Crosby asked me.

“Nope.”

“They just don’t have any crime down there. ‘Papa’ Monzano’s made crime so damn unattractive, nobody even thinks about it without getting sick. I heard you can lay a billfold in the middle of a sidewalk and you can come back a week later and it’ll be right there, with everything still in it.”

“Um.”

“You know what the punishment is for stealing something?”

“Nope.”

“The hook,” he said. “No fines, no probation, no thirty days in jail. It’s the hook. The hook for stealing, for murder, for arson, for treason, for rape, for being a peeping Tom. Break a law—any damn law at all—and it’s the hook. Everybody can understand that, and San Lorenzo is the best-behaved country in the world.”

“What is the hook?”

“They put up a gallows, see? Two posts and a cross beam. And then they take a great big kind of iron fishhook and they hang it down from the cross beam. Then they take somebody who’s dumb enough to break the law, and they put the point of the hook in through one side of his belly and out the other and they let him go—and there he hangs, by God, one damn sorry law-breaker.”