Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was published. The second letter started out like this:
‘The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
‘When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes.”’
And so on.
Billy was working on this letter in the basement rumpus room of his empty house. It was his housekeeper’s day off. There was an old typewriter in the rumpus room. It was a beast. It weighed as much as a storage battery. Billy couldn’t carry it very far very easily, which was why he was writing in the rumpus room instead of somewhere else.
The oil burner had quit. A mouse had eaten through the insulation of a wire leading to the thermostat. The temperature in the house was down to fifty degrees, but Billy hadn’t noticed. He wasn’t warmly dressed, either. He was barefoot, and still in his pajamas and a bathrobe, though it was late afternoon. His bare feet were blue and ivory.
The cockles of Billy’s heart, at any rate, were glowing coals. What made them so hot was Billy’s belief that he was going to comfort so many people with the truth about time. His door chimes upstairs had been ringing and ringing. It was his daughter Barbara up there wanting in. Now she let herself in with a key, crossed the floor over his head calling, ‘Father? Daddy, where are you?’ And so on.
Billy didn’t answer her, so she was nearly hysterical, expecting to find his corpse. And then she looked into the very last place there was to look-which was the rumpus room.
‘Why didn’t you answer me when I called?’ Barbara wanted to know, standing there in the door of the rumpus room. She had the afternoon paper with her, the one in which Billy described his friends from Tralfamadore.
‘I didn’t hear you,’ said Billy.
The orchestration of the moment was this: Barbara was only twenty-one years old, but she thought her father was senile, even though he was only forty-six-senile because of damage to his brain in the airplane crash. She also thought that she was head of the family, since she had had to manage her mother’s funeral, since she had to get a housekeeper for Billy, and all that. Also, Barbara and her husband were having to look after Billy’s business interests, which were considerable, since Billy didn’t seem to give a damn for business any more. All this responsibility at such an early age made her a bitchy flibbertigibbet. And Billy, meanwhile, was trying to hang onto his dignity, to persuade Barbara and everybody else that he was far from senile, that, on the contrary, he was devoting himself to a calling much higher than mere business.
He was doing nothing less now, he thought, then prescribing corrective lenses for Earthling souls. So many of those souls were lost and wretched, Billy believed, because they could not see as well as Ws little green friends on Tralfamadore.
‘Don’t lie to me, Father,’ said Barbara. ‘I know perfectly well you heard me when I called.’ This was a fairly pretty girl, except that she had legs like an Edwardian grand piano. Now she raised hell with him about the letter in the paper. She said he was making a laughing stock of himself and everybody associated with him.
‘Father, Father, Father,’ said Barbara, ‘what are we going to do with you? Are you going to force us to put you where your mother is?’ Billy’s mother was still alive. She was in bed in an old people’s home called Pine Knoll on the edge of Ilium.
‘What is it about my letter that makes you so mad?’ Billy wanted to know.
‘It’s all just crazy. None of it’s true! ‘
‘It’s all true. ‘ Bill’s anger was not going to rise with hers. He never got mad at anything. He was wonderful that way.
‘There is no such planet as Tralfamadore.’
‘It can’t be detected from Earth, if that’s what you mean,’ said Billy. ‘Earth can’t be detected from Tralfamadore, as far as that goes. They’re both very small. They’re very far apart.’
‘Where did you get a crazy name like “Tralfamadore?”’
‘That’s what the creatures who live there call it.
‘Oh God,’ said Barbara, and she turned her back on him. She celebrated frustration by clapping her hands. ‘May I ask you a simple question?’
‘Of course.’
‘Why is it you never mentioned any of this before the airplane crash?’
‘I didn’t think the time was ripe.’
And so on. Billy says that he first came unstuck in time in 1944, long before his trip to Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians didn’t have anything to do with his coming unstuck They were simply able to give him insights into what was really going on.
Billy first came unstuck while the Second World War was in progress. Billy was a chaplain’s assistant in the war. A chaplain’s assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the American Army. Billy was no exception. He was powerless to harm the enemy or to help his friends. In fact, he had no friends. He was a valet to a preacher, expected no promotions or medals, bore no arms, and had a meek faith in a loving Jesus which most soldiers found putrid.
While on maneuvers in South Carolina, Billy played hymns he knew from childhood, played them on a little black organ which was waterproof. It had thirty-nine keys and two stops-vox humana and vox celeste. Billy also had charge of a portable altar, an olive-drab attach? case with telescoping legs. It was lined with crimson plush, and nestled in that passionate plush were an anodized aluminum cross and a Bible.
The altar and the organ were made by a vacuum-cleaner company in Camden, New Jersey-and said so.
One time on maneuvers Billy was playing ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,’ with music by Johann Sebastian Bach and words by Martin Luther. It was Sunday morning. Billy and his chaplain had gathered a congregatation of about fifty soldiers on a Carolina hillside. An umpire appeared. There were umpires everywhere, men who said who was winning or losing the theoretical battle, who was alive and who was dead.
The umpire had comical news. The congregation had been theoretically spotted from the air by a theoretical enemy. They Were all theoretically dead now. The theoretical corpses laughed and ate a hearty noontime meal.
Remembering this incident years later, Billy was struck by what a Tralfamadorian adventure with death that had been, to be dead and to eat at the same time.
Toward the end of maneuvers., Billy was given an emergency furlough home because his father, a barber in Ilium, New York, was shot dead by a friend while they were out hunting deer. So it goes.
When Billy got back from his furlough., there were orders for him to go overseas. He was needed in the headquarters company of an infantry regiment fighting in Luxembourg. The regimental chaplain’s assistant had been killed in action. So it goes.
When Billy joined the regiment, it was in the process of being destroyed by the Germans in the famous Battle of the Bulge. Billy never even got to meet the chaplain he was supposed to assist, was never even issued a steel helmet and combat boots. This was in December of 1944, during the last mighty German attack of the war.
Billy survived, but he was a dazed wanderer far behind the new German lines. Three other wanderers, not quite so dazed, allowed Billy to tag along. Two of them were scouts, and one was an antitank gunner. They were without food or maps. Avoiding Germans they were delivering themselves into rural silences ever more profound. They ate snow.
They went Indian file. First came the scouts, clever, graceful quiet. They had rifles. Next came the antitank gunner, clumsy and dense, warning Germans away with a Colt .45 automatic in one hand and a trench knife in the other.