Mona was already sitting on the floor, her legs extended, her round arms thrust behind her for support, her head tilted back, her eyes closed.
It was up to me now to complete my first—my first—my first, Great God …
Boko-maru.
On the Poet’s Celebration of His First Boko-maru 92
These are not Bokonon’s words. They are mine.
Sweet wraith,
Invisible mist of …
I am—
My soul—
Wraith lovesick o’erlong,
O’erlong alone:
Wouldst another sweet soul meet?
Long have I
Advised thee ill
As to where two souls
Might tryst.
My soles, my soles!
My soul, my soul,
Go there,
Sweet soul;
Be kissed.
Mmmmmmm.
How I Almost Lost My Mona 93
“Do you find it easier to talk to me now?” Mona inquired.
“As though I’d known you for a thousand years,” I confessed. I felt like crying. “I love you, Mona.”
“I love you.” She said it simply.
“What a fool Frank was!”
“Oh?”
“To give you up.”
“He did not love me. He was going to marry me only because ‘Papa’ wanted him to. He loves another.”
“Who?”
“A woman he knew in Ilium.”
The lucky woman had to be the wife of the owner of Jack’s Hobby Shop. “He told you?”
“Tonight, when he freed me to marry you.”
“Mona?”
“Yes?”
“Is—is there anyone else in your life?”
She was puzzled. “Many,” she said at last.
“That you love?”
“I love everyone.”
“As—as much as me?”
“Yes.” She seemed to have no idea that this might bother me.
I got off the floor, sat in a chair, and started putting my shoes and socks back on.
“I suppose you—you perform—you do what we just did with—with other people?”
“Boko-maru?”
“Boko-maru.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t want you to do it with anybody but me from now on,” I declared.
Tears filled her eyes. She adored her promiscuity; was angered that I should try to make her feel shame. “I make people happy. Love is good, not bad.”
“As your husband, I’ll want all your love for myself.”
She stared at me with widening eyes. “A sin-wat!”
“What was that?”
“A sin-wat!” she cried. “A man who wants all of somebody’s love. That’s very bad.”
“In the case of marriage, I think it’s a very good thing. It’s the only thing.”
She was still on the floor, and I, now with my shoes and socks back on, was standing. I felt very tall, though I’m not very tall; and I felt very strong, though I’m not very strong; and I was a respectful stranger to my own voice. My voice had a metallic authority that was new.
As I went on talking in ball-peen tones, it dawned on me what was happening, what was happening already. I was already starting to rule.
I told Mona that I had seen her performing a sort of vertical boko-maru with a pilot on the reviewing stand shortly after my arrival. “You are to have nothing more to do with him,” I told her. “What is his name?”
“I don’t even know,” she whispered. She was looking down now.
“And what about young Philip Castle?”
“You mean boko-maru?”
“I mean anything and everything. As I understand it, you two grew up together.”
“Yes.”
“Bokonon tutored you both?”
“Yes.” The recollection made her radiant again.
“I suppose there was plenty of boko-maruing in those days.”
“Oh, yes!” she said happily.
“You aren’t to see him any more, either. Is that clear?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I will not marry a sin-wat.” She stood. “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye?” I was crushed.
“Bokonon tells us it is very wrong not to love everyone exactly the same. What does your religion say?”
“I—I don’t have one.”
“I do.”
I had stopped ruling. “I see you do,” I said.
“Goodbye, man-with-no-religion.” She went to the stone staircase.
“Mona …”
She stopped. “Yes?”
“Could I have your religion, if I wanted it?”
“Of course.”
“I want it.”
“Good. I love you.”
“And I love you,” I sighed.
The Highest Mountain 94
So I became betrothed at dawn to the most beautiful woman in the world. And I agreed to become the next President of San Lorenzo.
“Papa” wasn’t dead yet, and it was Frank’s feeling that I should get “Papa’s” blessing, if possible. So, as Borasisi, the sun, came up, Frank and I drove to “Papa’s” castle in a Jeep we commandeered from the troops guarding the next President.
Mona stayed at Frank’s. I kissed her sacredly, and she went to sacred sleep.
Over the mountains Frank and I went, through groves of wild coffee trees, with the flamboyant sunrise on our right.
It was in the sunrise that the cetacean majesty of the highest mountain on the island, of Mount McCabe, made itself known to me. It was a fearful hump, a blue whale, with one queer stone plug on its back for a peak. In scale with a whale, the plug might have been the stump of a snapped harpoon, and it seemed so unrelated to the rest of the mountain that I asked Frank if it had been built by men.
He told me that it was a natural formation. Moreover, he declared that no man, as far as he knew, had ever been to the top of Mount McCabe.
“It doesn’t look very tough to climb,” I commented. Save for the plug at the top, the mountain presented inclines no more forbidding than courthouse steps. And the plug itself, from a distance at any rate, seemed conveniently laced with ramps and ledges.
“Is it sacred or something?” I asked.
“Maybe it was once. But not since Bokonon.”
“Then why hasn’t anybody climbed it?”
“Nobody’s felt like it yet.”
“Maybe I’ll climb it.”
“Go ahead. Nobody’s stopping you.”
We rode in silence.
“What is sacred to Bokononists?” I asked after a while.
“Not even God, as near as I can tell.”
“Nothing?”
“Just one thing.”
I made some guesses. “The ocean? The sun?”
“Man,” said Frank. “That’s all. Just man.”
I See the Hook 95
We came at last to the castle.
It was low and black and cruel.
Antique cannons still lolled on the battlements. Vines and bird nests clogged the crenels, the machicolations, and the balistrariae.
Its parapets to the north were continuous with the scarp of a monstrous precipice that fell six hundred feet straight down to the lukewarm sea.
It posed the question posed by all such stone piles: how had puny men moved stones so big? And, like all such stone piles, it answered the question itself. Dumb terror had moved those stones so big.
The castle was built according to the wish of Tum-bumwa, Emperor of San Lorenzo, a demented man, an escaped slave. Tum-bumwa was said to have found its design in a child’s picture book.
A gory book it must have been.
Just before we reached the palace gate the ruts carried us through a rustic arch made of two telephone poles and a beam that spanned them.
Hanging from the middle of the beam was a huge iron hook. There was a sign impaled on the hook.
“This hook,” the sign proclaimed, “is reserved for Bokonon himself.”
I turned to look at the hook again, and that thing of sharp iron communicated to me that I really was going to rule. I would chop down the hook!
And I flattered myself that I was going to be a firm, just, and kindly ruler, and that my people would prosper.
Fata Morgana.
Mirage!
Bell, Book, and Chicken in a Hatbox 96
Frank and I couldn’t get right in to see “Papa.” Dr. Schlichter von Koenigswald, the physician in attendance, muttered that we would have to wait about half an hour. So Frank and I waited in the anteroom of “Papa’s” suite, a room without windows. The room was thirty feet square, furnished with several rugged benches and a card table. The card table supported an electric fan. The walls were stone. There were no pictures, no decorations of any sort on the walls.
There were iron rings fixed to the wall, however, seven feet off the floor and at intervals of six feet. I asked Frank if the room had ever been a torture chamber.
He told me that it had, and that the manhole cover on which I stood was the lid of an oubliette.
There was a listless guard in the anteroom. There was also a Christian minister, who was ready to take care of “Papa’s” spiritual needs as they arose. He had a brass dinner bell and a hatbox with holes drilled in it, and a Bible, and a butcher knife—all laid out on the bench beside him.
He told me there was a live chicken in the hatbox. The chicken was quiet, he said, because he had fed it tranquilizers.
Like all San Lorenzans past the age of twenty-five, he looked at least sixty. He told me that his name was Dr. Vox Humana, that he was named after an organ stop that had struck his mother when San Lorenzo Cathedral was dynamited in 1923. His father, he told me without shame, was unknown.