“I wish now I’d studied everything more.”
“We’ve all got regrets, Mom.”
“No use crying over spilt milk.”
“As the poet said, Mom, ‘Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.”’”
“That’s so beautiful, and so true.”
Frank’s Ant Farm 124
I hated to see Hazel finishing the flag, because I was all balled up in her addled plans for it. She had the idea that I had agreed to plant the fool thing on the peak of Mount McCabe.
“If Lowe and I were younger, we’d do it ourselves. Now all we can do is give you the flag and send our best wishes with you.”
“Mom, I wonder if that’s really a good place for the flag.”
“What other place is there?’
“I’ll put on my thinking cap.” I excused myself and went down into the cave to see what Frank was up to.
He was up to nothing new. He was watching an ant farm he had constructed. He had dug up a few surviving ants in the three-dimensional world of the ruins of Bolivar, and he had reduced the dimensions to two by making a dirt and ant sandwich between two sheets of glass. The ants could do nothing without Frank’s catching them at it and commenting upon it.
The experiment had solved in short order the mystery of how ants could survive in a waterless world. As far as I know, they were the only insects that did survive, and they did it by forming with their bodies tight balls around grains of ice-nine. They would generate enough heat at the center to kill half their number and produce one bead of dew. The dew was drinkable. The corpses were edible.
“Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” I said to Frank and his tiny cannibals.
His response was always the same. It was a peevish lecture on all the things that people could learn from ants.
My responses were ritualized, too. “Nature’s a wonderful thing, Frank. Nature’s a wonderful thing.”
“You know why ants are so successful?” he asked me for the thousandth time. “They co-_op_-er-ate.”
“That’s a hell of a good word—co-operation.”
“Who taught them how to make water?”
“Who taught me how to make water?”
“That’s a silly answer and you know it.”
“Sorry.”
“There was a time when I took people’s silly answers seriously. I’m past that now.”
“A milestone.”
“I’ve grown up a good deal.”
“At a certain amount of expense to the world.” I could say things like that to Frank with an absolute assurance that he would not hear them.
“There was a time when people could bluff me without much trouble because I didn’t have much self-confidence in myself.”
“The mere cutting down of the number of people on earth would go a long way toward alleviating your own particular social problems,” I suggested. Again, I made the suggestion to a deaf man.
“You tell me, you tell me who told these ants how to make water,” he challenged me again.
Several times I had offered the obvious notion that God had taught them. And I knew from onerous experience that he would neither reject nor accept this theory. He simply got madder and madder, putting the question again and again.
I walked away from Frank, just as The Books of Bokonon advised me to do. “Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before,” Bokonon tells us. “He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”
I went looking for our painter, for little Newt.
The Tasmanians 125
When I found little Newt, painting a blasted landscape a quarter of a mile from the cave, he asked me if I would drive him into Bolivar to forage for paints. He couldn’t drive himself. He couldn’t reach the pedals.
So off we went, and, on the way, I asked him if he had any sex urge left. I mourned that I had none—no dreams in that line, nothing.
“I used to dream of women twenty, thirty, forty feet tall,” he told me. “But now? God, I can’t even remember what my Ukrainian midget looked like.”
I recalled a thing I had read about the aboriginal Tasmanians, habitually naked persons who, when encountered by white men in the seventeenth century, were strangers to agriculture, animal husbandry, architecture of any sort, and possibly even fire. They were so contemptible in the eyes of white men, by reason of their ignorance, that they were hunted for sport by the first settlers, who were convicts from England. And the aborigines found life so unattractive that they gave up reproducing.
I suggested to Newt now that it was a similar hopelessness that had unmanned us.
Newt made a shrewd observation. “I guess all the excitement in bed had more to do with excitement about keeping the human race going than anybody ever imagined.”
“Of course, if we had a woman of breeding age among us, that might change the situation radically. Poor old Hazel is years beyond having even a Mongolian idiot.”
Newt revealed that he knew quite a bit about Mongolian idiots. He had once attended a special school for grotesque children, and several of his schoolmates had been Mongoloids. “The best writer in our class was a Mongoloid named Myrna—I mean penmanship, not what she actually wrote down. God, I haven’t thought about her for years.”
“Was it a good school?”
“All I remember is what the headmaster used to say all the time. He was always bawling us out over the loudspeaker system for some mess we’d made, and he always started out the same way: ‘I am sick and tired …’”
“That comes pretty close to describing how I feel most of the time.”
“Maybe that’s the way you’re supposed to feel.”
“You talk like a Bokononist, Newt.”
“Why shouldn’t I? As far as I know, Bokononism is the only religion that has any commentary on midgets.”
When I hadn’t been writing, I’d been poring over The Books of Bokonon, but the reference to midgets had escaped me. I was grateful to Newt for calling it to my attention, for the quotation captured in a couplet the cruel paradox of Bokononist thought, the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it.
Midget, midget, midget, how he struts and winks,
For he knows a man’s as big as what he hopes and thinks!
Soft Pipes, Play On 126
“Such a depressing religion!” I cried. I directed our conversation into the area of Utopias, of what might have been, of what should have been, of what might yet be, if the world would thaw.
But Bokonon had been there, too, had written a whole book about Utopias, The Seventh Book, which he called “Bokonon’s Republic.” In that book are these ghastly aphorisms:
The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world.
Let us start our Republic with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas chambers, and a national game. After that, we can write our Constitution.
I called Bokonon a jigaboo bastard, and I changed the subject again. I spoke of meaningful, individual heroic acts. I praised in particular the way in which Julian Castle and his son had chosen to die. While the tornadoes still raged, they had set out on foot for the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle to give whatever hope and mercy was theirs to give. And I saw magnificence in the way poor Angela had died, too. She had picked up a clarinet in the ruins of Bolivar and had begun to play it at once, without concerning herself as to whether the mouthpiece might be contaminated with ice-nine.
“Soft pipes, play on,” I murmured huskily.
“Well, maybe you can find some neat way to die, too,” said Newt.
It was a Bokononist thing to say.
I blurted out my dream of climbing Mount McCabe with some magnificent symbol and planting it there. I took my hands from the wheel for an instant to show him how empty of symbols they were. “But what in hell would the right symbol be, Newt? What in hell would it be?” I grabbed the wheel again. “Here it is, the end of the world; and here I am, almost the very last man; and there it is, the highest mountain in sight. I know now what my karass has been up to, Newt. It’s been working night and day for maybe half a million years to get me up that mountain.” I wagged my head and nearly wept. “But what, for the love of God, is supposed to be in my hands?”
I looked out of the car window blindly as I asked that, so blindly that I went more than a mile before realizing that I had looked into the eyes of an old Negro man, a living colored man, who was sitting by the side of the road.