Vonnegut, Kurt – Cat’s Cradle

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.

A Karass Built for Two 41

The 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 seatmates were Horlick Minton, the new American Ambassador to the Republic of San Lorenzo, and his wife, Claire. They were whitehaired, 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.

Bicycles for Afghanistan 42

There 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 every 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 …”

“Attach�,” 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:

If you wish to study a granfalloon,

Just remove the skin of a toy balloon.

The Demonstrator 43

H. Lowe Crosby 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 barn-yard clownishness, 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 ‘Papa’ 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.”

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