‘Are you really an American?’ said the Englishman.
‘Yes,’ said Billy.
‘And your rank?’
‘Private.’
‘What became of your boots, lad?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Is that coat a joke?’
‘Sir?’
‘Where did you get such a thing?’
Billy had to think hard about that. ‘They gave it to me,’ he said at last.
‘Jerry gave it to you?’
‘Who? ‘
‘The Germans gave it to you?’
‘Yes.’
Billy didn’t like the questions. They were fatiguing.
‘Ohhhh-Yank, Yank, Yank,’ said the Englishman, ‘that coat was an insult,
‘Sir? ‘
‘It was a deliberate attempt to humiliate you. You mustn’t let Jerry do things like that.’
Billy Pilgrim swooned.
Billy came to on a chair facing the stage. He I had somehow eaten, and now he was watching Cinderella. Some part of him had evidently been enjoying the performance for quite a while. Billy was laughing hard.
The women in the play were really men, of course. The clock had just struck midnight and Cinderella was lamenting
‘Goodness me, the clock has struck—
Alackaday, and fuck my luck.’
Billy found the couplet so comical that he not only laughed-he shrieked. He went on shrieking until he was carried out of the shed and into another, where the hospital was. It was a six-bed hospital. There weren’t any other patients in there.
Billy was put to bed and tied down, and given a shot of morphine. Another American volunteered to watch over him. This volunteer was Edgar Derby, the high school teacher who would be shot to death in Dresden. So it goes.
Derby sat on a three-legged stool. He was given a book to read. The book was The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane. Derby had read it before. Now he read it again while Billy Pilgrim entered a morphine paradise.
Under morphine, Billy had a dream of giraffes in a garden. The giraffes were following gravel paths, were pausing to munch sugar pears from treetops. Billy was a giraffe, too. He ate a pear. It was a hard one. It fought back against his grinding teeth. It snapped in juicy protest.
The giraffes accepted Billy as one of their own, as a harmless creature as preposterously specialized as themselves. Two approached him from opposite sides, leaned against him. They had long, muscular upper lips which they could shape like the bells of bugles. They kissed him with these. They were female giraffes-cream and lemon yellow. They had horns like doorknobs. The knobs were covered with velvet.
Why?
Night came to the garden of the giraffes, and Billy Pilgrim slept without dreaming for a while, and then he traveled in time. He woke up with his head under a blanket in a ward for nonviolent mental patients in a veterans’ hospital near Lake Placid, New York. It was springtime in 1948, three years after the end of the war.
Billy uncovered his head. The windows of the ward were open. Birds were twittering outside. ‘Poo-tee-weet?’ one asked him. The sun was high. There were twenty-nine other patients assigned to the ward, but they were all outdoors now, enjoying the day. They were free to come and go as they pleased, to go home, even., if they liked-and so was Billy Pilgrim. They had come here voluntarily, alarmed by the outside world.
Billy had committed himself in the middle of his final year at the Ilium School of Optometry. Nobody else suspected that he was going crazy. Everybody else thought he looked fine and was acting fine. Now he was in the hospital. The doctors agreed: He was going crazy.
They didn’t think it had anything to do with the war. They were sure Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A. swimming pool when he was a little boy, and had then taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon.
The man assigned to the bed next to Billy’s was a former infantry captain named Eliot Rosewater. Rosewater was sick and tired of being drunk all the time.
It was Rosewater who introduced Billy to science fiction, and in particular to the writings of Kilgore Trout. Rosewater had a tremendous collection of science-fiction paperbacks under his bed. He had brought them to the hospital in a steamer trunk. Those beloved, frumpish books gave off a smell that permeated the ward-like flannel pajamas that hadn’t been changed for a month, or like Irish stew.
Kilgore Trout became Billy’s favorite living author, and science fiction became the only sort of tales he could read.
Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy., but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater., for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the firebombing of Dresden. So it goes.
So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help.
Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy one time about a book that wasn’t science fiction. He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoevsky. ‘But that isn’t enough any more.’ said Rosewater.
Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, ‘I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living.’
There was a still life on Billy’s bedside table-two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette Still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes. Air was trying to get out of that dead water. Bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out.
The cigarettes belonged to Billy’s chain-smoking mother. She had sought the ladies’ room, which was off the ward for WACS and WAVES and SPARS and WAFS who had gone bananas. She would be back at any moment now.
Billy covered his head with his blanket again. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward-always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high-school education.
She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.
Billy heard Eliot Rosewater come in and lie down. Rosewater’s bedsprings talked a lot about that. Rosewater was a big man, but not very powerful. He looked as though he might be made out of nose putty.
And then Billy’s mother came back from the ladies’ room, sat down on a chair between Billy’s and Rosewater’s bed. Rosewater greeted her with melodious warmth, asked how she was today. He seemed delighted to hear that she was fine. He was experimenting with being ardently sympathetic with everybody he met. He thought that might make the world a slightly more pleasant place to live in. He called Billy’s mother ‘dear.’ He was experimenting with calling everybody ‘dear.’
Some day’ she promised Rosewater., “I’m going to come in here, and Billy is going to uncover his head, and do you know what he’s going to say?’
‘What’s he going to say, dear?’
‘He’s going to say, “Hello, Mom,” and he’s going to smile. He’s going to say, “Gee, it’s good to see you, Mom. How have you been?”’
‘Today could -be the day.’
‘Every night I pray.’
‘That’s a good thing to do.’
‘People would be surprised ff they knew how much in this world was due to prayers.’
‘You never said a truer word, dear.’
‘Does your mother come to see you often?’
‘My mother is dead,’ said Rosewater. So it goes.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘At least she had a happy life as long as it lasted.’
‘That’s a consolation, anyway.’
‘Yes.’
‘Billy’s father is dead., you know, said Billy’s mother. So it goes.
‘A boy needs a father.’
And on and on it went-that duet between the dumb, praying lady and the big, hollow man so full of loving echoes.
‘He was at the top of his class when this happened,’ said Billy’s mother.
‘Maybe he. was working too hard.’ said Rosewater. He held a book he wanted to read, but he was much too polite to read and talk, too, easy as it was to give Billy’s mother satisfactory answers. The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people whose mental diseases couldn’t be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension., and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn’t see those causes at all, or even imagine them.