I lighted a candle. I opened a can of campbell’s chicken gumbo soup and I put it on a Sterno stove. And I poured two glasses of Virgin Islands rum.
Mona sat on one bed. I sat down on the other. “I am about to say something that must have been said by men to women several times before,” I informed her. “However, I don’t believe that these words have ever carried quite the freight they carry now.”
“Oh?”
I spread my hands. “Here we are.”
The Iron Maiden and the Oubliette 118
The Sixth Book of The Books of Bokonon is devoted to pain, in particular to tortures inflicted by men on men. “If I am ever put to death on the hook,” Bokonon warns us, “expect a very human performance.”
Then he speaks of the rack and the peddiwinkus and the iron maiden and the veglia and the oubliette.
In any case, there’s bound to be much crying.
But the oubliette alone will let you think while dying.
And so it was in Mona’s and my rock womb. At least we could think. And one thing I thought was that the creature comforts of the dungeon did nothing to mitigate the basic fact of oubliation.
During our first day and night underground, tornadoes rattled our manhole cover many times an hour. Each time the pressure in our hole would drop suddenly, and our ears would pop and our heads would ring.
As for the radio—there was crackling, fizzing static and that was all. From one end of the short-wave band to the other not one word, not one telegrapher’s beep, did I hear. If life still existed here and there, it did not broadcast.
Nor does life broadcast to this day.
This I assumed: tornadoes, strewing the poisonous blue-white frost of ice-nine everywhere, tore everyone and everything above ground to pieces. Anything that still lived would die soon enough of thirst—or hunger—or rage—or apathy.
I turned to The Books of Bokonon, still sufficiently unfamiliar with them to believe that they contained spiritual comfort somewhere. I passed quickly over the warning on the title page of The First Book:
“Don’t be a fool! Close this book at once! It is nothing but foma!”
Foma, of course, are lies.
And then I read this:
In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.
And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.
“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.
“Certainly,” said man.
“Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God.
And He went away.
I thought this was trash.
“Of course it’s trash!” says Bokonon.
And I turned to my heavenly Mona for comforting secrets a good deal more profound.
I was able, while mooning at her across the space that separated our beds, to imagine that behind her marvelous eyes lurked mysteries as old as Eve.
I will not go into the sordid sex episode that followed. Suffice it to say that I was both repulsive and repulsed.
The girl was not interested in reproduction—hated the idea. Before the tussle was over, I was given full credit by her, and by myself, too, for having invented the whole bizarre, grunting, sweating enterprise by which new human beings were made.
Returning to my own bed, gnashing my teeth, I supposed that she honestly had no idea what love-making was all about. But then she said to me, gently, “It would be very sad to have a little baby now. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes,” I agreed murkily.
“Well, that’s the way little babies are made, in case you didn’t know.”
Mona Thanks Me 119
“Today I will be a Bulgarian Minister of Education,” Bokonon tells us. “Tomorrow I will be Helen of Troy.” His meaning is crystal clear: Each one of us has to be what he or she is. And, down in the oubliette, that was mainly what I thought—with the help of The Books of Bokonon.
Bokonon invited me to sing along with him:
We do, doodley do, doodley do, doodley do,
What we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must;
Muddily do, muddily do, muddily do, muddily do,
Until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust.
I made up a tune to go with that and I whistled it under my breath as I drove the bicycle that drove the fan that gave us air, good old air.
“Man breathes in oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide,” I called to Mona.
“What?”
“Science.”
“Oh.”
“One of the secrets of life man was a long time understanding: Animals breathe in what animals breathe out, and vice versa.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You know now.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
When I’d bicycled our atmosphere to sweetness and freshness, I dismounted and climbed the iron rungs to see what the weather was like above. I did that several times a day. On that day, the fourth day, I perceived through the narrow crescent of the lifted manhole cover that the weather had become somewhat stabilized.
The stability was of a wildly dynamic sort, for the tornadoes were as numerous as ever, and tornadoes remain numerous to this day. But their mouths no longer gobbled and gnashed at the earth. The mouths in all directions were discreetly withdrawn to an altitude of perhaps a half of a mile. And their altitude varied so little from moment to moment that San Lorenzo might have been protected by a tornado-proof sheet of glass.
We let three more days go by, making certain that the tornadoes had become as sincerely reticent as they seemed. And then we filled canteens from our water tank and we went above.
The air was dry and hot and deathly still.
I had heard it suggested one time that the seasons in the temperate zone ought to be six rather than four in number: summer, autumn, locking, winter, unlocking, and spring. And I remembered that as I straightened up beside our manhole, and stared and listened and sniffed.
There were no smells. There was no movement. Every step I took made a gravelly squeak in blue-white frost. And every squeak was echoed loudly. The season of locking was over. The earth was locked up tight.
It was winter, now and forever.
I helped my Mona out of our hole. I warned her to keep her hands away from the blue-white frost and to keep her hands away from her mouth, too. “Death has never been quite so easy to come by,” I told her. “All you have to do is touch the ground and then your lips and you’re done for.”
She shook her head and sighed. “A very bad mother.”
“What?”
“Mother Earth—she isn’t a very good mother any more.”
“Hello? Hello?” I called through the palace ruins. The awesome winds had torn canyons through that great stone pile. Mona and I made a half-hearted search for survivors—half-hearted because we could sense no life. Not even a nibbling, twinkle-nosed rat had survived.
The arch of the palace gate was the only man-made form untouched. Mona and I went to it. Written at its base in white paint was a Bokononist “Calypso.” The lettering was neat. It was new. It was proof that someone else had survived the winds.
The “Calypso” was this:
Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end,
And our God will take things back that He to us did lend.
And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,
Why go right ahead and scold Him. He’ll just smile and nod.
To Whom It May Concern 120
I recalled an advertisement for a set of children’s books called The Book of Knowledge. In that ad, a trusting boy and girl looked up at their father. “Daddy,” one asked, “what makes the sky blue?” The answer, presumably, could be found in The Book of Knowledge.
If I had had my daddy beside me as Mona and I walked down the road from the palace, I would have had plenty of questions to ask as I clung to his hand. “Daddy, why are all the trees broken? Daddy, why are all the birds dead? Daddy, what makes the sky so sick and wormy? Daddy, what makes the sea so hard and still?”
It occurred to me that I was better qualified to answer those tough questions than any other human being, provided there were any other human beings alive. In case anyone was interested, I knew what had gone wrong— where and how.
So what?
I wondered where the dead could be. Mona and I ventured more than a mile from our oubliette without seeing one dead human being.