Billy Pilgrim tried hard to care.
A siren went off, scared the hell out of him. He was expecting the Third World War at any time. The siren was simply announcing high noon. It was housed in a cupola atop a firehouse across the street from Billy’s office.
Billy closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was back in the Second World War again. His head was on the wounded rabbi’s shoulder. A German was kicking his feet, telling him to wake up, that it was time to move on.
The Americans, with Billy among them, formed a fools’ parade on the road outside.
There was a photographer present, a German war correspondent with a Leica. He took pictures of Billy’s and Roland Weary’s feet. The picture was widely published two days later as heartening evidence of how miserably equipped the American Army often was, despite its reputation for being rich.
The photographer wanted something more lively, though, a picture of an actual capture. So the guards staged one for him. They threw Billy into shrubbery. When Billy came out of the shrubbery, his face wreathed in goofy good will, they menaced him with their machine pistols, as though they were capturing him then.
Billy’s smile as he came out of the shrubbery was at least as peculiar as Mona Lisa’s, for he was simultaneously on foot in Germany in 1944 and riding his Cadillac in 1967. Germany dropped away, and 1967 became bright and clear, free of interference from any other time. Billy was on his way to a Lions Club luncheon meeting. It was a hot August, but Billy’s car was air-conditioned. He was stopped by a signal in the middle of Ilium’s black ghetto. The people who lived here hated it so much that they had burned down a lot of it a month before. It was all they had, and they’d wrecked it. The neighborhood reminded Billy of some of the towns he had seen in the war. The curbs and sidewalks were crushed in many places, showing where the National Guard tanks and half-tracks had been.
‘Blood brother,’ said a message written in pink paint on the side of a shattered grocery store.
There was a tap on Billy’s car window. A black man was out there. He wanted to talk about something. The light had changed. Billy did the simplest thing. He drove on.
Billy drove through a scene of even greater desolation. It looked like Dresden after it was firebombed-like the surface of the moon. The house where Billy had grown up used to be somewhere in what was so empty now. This was urban renewal. A new Ilium Government Center and a Pavilion of the Arts and a Peace Lagoon and high-rise apartment buildings were going up here soon.
That was all right with Billy Pilgrim.
The speaker at the Lions Club meeting was a major in the Marines. He said that Americans had no choice but to keep fighting in Vietnam until they achieved victory or until the Communists realized that they could not force their way of life -on weak countries. The major had been there on two separate tours of duty. He told of many terrible and many wonderful things he had seen. He was in favor of increased bombings, of bombing North Vietnam back into the Stone Age, if it refused to see reason.
Billy was not moved to protest the bombing of North Vietnam-, did not shudder about the hideous things he himself had seen bombing do. He was simply having lunch with the Lions Club, of which he was past president now.
Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy’s wall told him that it helped them to keep going,, too. It went like this
GOD GRANT ME
THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT
THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE
COURAGE
TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN,
AND WISDOM ALWAYS
TO TELL THE
DIFFERENCE.
Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present and the future.
Now he was being introduced to the Marine major. The person who was performing the introduction was telling the major that Billy was a veteran., and that Billy had a son who was a sergeant in the Green Berets-in Vietnam.
The major told Billy that the Green Berets were doing a great job, and that he should be proud of his son.
‘I am. I certainly am,’ said Billy Pilgrim.
He went home for a nap after lunch. He was under doctor’s orders to take a nap every day. The doctor hoped that this would relieve a complaint that Billy had: Every so often, for no apparent reason, Billy Pilgrim would find himself weeping. Nobody had ever caught Billy doing it. Only the doctor knew. It was an extremely quiet thing Billy did, and not very moist.
Billy owned a lovely Georgian home in Ilium. He was rich as Croesus, something he had never expected to be, not in a million years. He had five other optometrists working for him in the shopping plaza location, and netted over sixty thousand dollars a year. In addition, he owned a fifth of the new Holiday Inn out on Route 54, and -half of three Tastee-Freeze stands. Tastee-Freeze was a sort of frozen custard. It gave all the pleasure that ice cream could give, without the stiffness and bitter coldness of ice cream.
Billy’s home was empty. His daughter Barbara was about to get warned, and she and his wife had gone downtown to pick out patterns for her crystal and silverware. There was a note saying so on the kitchen table. There were no servants. People just weren’t interested in careers in domestic service anymore. There wasn’t a dog, either.
There used to be a dog named Spot, but he died. So it goes. Billy had liked Spot a lot, and Spot had liked him.
Billy went up the carpeted stairway and into his and his wife’s bedroom. The room had flowered wallpaper. There was a double bed with a clock-radio on a table beside it. Also on the table were controls for the electric blanket, and a switch to turn on a gentle vibrator which was bolted to the springs of the box mattress. The trade name of the vibrator was ‘Magic Fingers.’ The vibrator was the doctor’s idea, too.
Billy took off his trifocals and his coat and his necktie and his shoes, and he closed the venetian blinds and then the drapes, and he lay down on the outside of the coverlet. But sleep would not come. Tears came instead. They seeped. Billy turned on the Magic Fingers, and he was jiggled as he wept.
The doorchimes rang. Billy got off the bed and looked down through a window at the front doorstep, to see if somebody important had come to call. There was a crippled man down there, as spastic in space as Billy Pilgrim was in time. Convulsions made the man dance flappingly all the time, made him change his expressions, too, as though he were trying to imitate various famous movie stars.
Another cripple was ringing a doorbell across the street. He was an crutches. He had only one leg. He was so jammed between his crutches that his shoulders hid his ears.
Billy knew what the cripples were up to: They were selling subscriptions to magazines that would never come. People subscribed to them because the salesmen were so pitiful. Billy had heard about this racket from a speaker at the Lions Club two weeks before—a man from the Better Business Bureau. The man said that anybody who saw cripples working a neighbourhood for magazine subscriptions should call the police.
Billy looked down the street, saw a new, Buick Riviera parked about half a block away. There was a man in it, and Billy assumed correctly that he was the man who had hired the cripples to do this thing. Billy went on weeping as he contemplated the cripples and their boss. His doorchimes clanged hellishly.
He closed his eyes, and opened them again. lie was still weeping, but he was back in Luxembourg again. He was marching with a lot of other prisoners. It was a winter wind that was bringing tears to his eyes.
Ever since Billy had been thrown into shrubbery for the sake of the picture, he had been seeing Saint Elmo’s fire, a sort of electronic radiance around the heads of his companions and captors. It was in the treetops and on the rooftops of Luxembourg, too. It was beautiful.
Billy was marching with his hands on top of his head, and so were all the other Americans. Billy was bobbing up-and-down, up-and-down. Now he crashed into Roland Weary accidentally. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said.
Weary’s eyes were tearful also. Weary was crying because of horrible pains in his feet. The hinged clogs were transforming his feet into blood puddings.