Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

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HOCUS

POCUS

KURT _ VONNEGUT

EDITOR’S NOTE

The author of this book did not have access to writing paper of uniform size and quality. He wrote in a

library housing some eight hundred thousand volumes of interest to no one else. Most had never been

read and probably never would be read, so there was nothing to stop him from tearing out their blank

endpapers for stationery. This he did not do. Why he did not do this is not known. Whatever the reason,

he wrote this book in pencil on everything from brown wrapping paper to the backs of business cards. The

unconventional lines separating passages within chapters indicate where one scrap ended and the next

began. The shorter the passage, the smaller the scrap.

One can speculate that the author, fishing through trash for anything to write on, may have hoped to

establish a reputation for humility or insanity, since he was facing trial. It is equally likely, though, that he

began this book impulsively, having no idea it would become a book, scribbling words on a scrap which

happened to be right at hand. It could be that he found it congenial, then, to continue on from scrap to

scrap, as though each were a bottle for him to fill. When he filled one up, possibly, no matter what its

size, he could satisfy himself that he had written everything there was to write about this or that.

He numbered all the pages so there could be no doubt

about their being sequential, nor about his hope that someone, undaunted by their disreputable

appearance, would read them as a book. He in fact says here and there, with increasing confidence as he

nears the end, that what he is doing is writing a book.

There are several drawings of a tombstone. The author made only one such drawing. The others are

tracings of the original, probably made by superimposing translucent pieces of paper and pressing them

against a sunlit library windowpane. He wrote words on the face of each burial marker, and in one case

simply a question mark. These did not reproduce well on a printed page. So they have been set in type

instead.

The author himself is responsible for the capitalization of certain words whose initial letters a

meticulous editor might prefer to see in lowercase. So, too, did Eugene Debs Hartke choose for reasons

unexplained to let numbers stand for themselves, except at the heads of sentences, rather than put them

into words: for example, “2” instead of “two.” He may have felt that numbers lost much of their potency

when diluted by an alphabet.

To virtually all of his idiosyncrasies I, after much thought, have applied what another author once told

me was the most sacred word in a great editor’s vocabulary. That word is “stet.”

K.V.

This work of pure fiction is dedicated to the

memory of

EUGENE VICToR Dens

1855—1926

“While there is a lower class I am in it. While there is a criminal element I am of it. While there is a soul in prison I

am not free.”

y name is Eugene Debs Hartke, and I was born in 1940. I was named at the behest of my maternal

grandfather, Benjamin Wills, who was a Socialist and an Atheist, and nothing but a groundskeeper

at Butler University, in Indianapolis, Indiana, in honor of Eugene Debs of Terre Haute, Indiana.

Debs was a Socialist and a Pacifist and a Labor Organizer who ran several times for the Presidency of

the United States of America, and got more votes than has any other candidate nominated by a third

party in the history of this counDebs died in 1926, when I was a negative 14 years of

age.

The year is 2001 now.

If all had gone the way a lot of people thought it would, Jesus Christ would have been among us again,

and the American flag would have been planted on Venus and Mars.

No such luck!

At least the World will end, an event anticipated with great joy by many. It will end very soon, but not

in the year 2000, which has come and gone. From that I conclude that God Almighty is not heavily into

Numerology.

Grandfather Benjamin Wills died in 1948, when I was

a pIus 8 years of age, but not before he made sure that

I knew by heart the most famous words uttered by

Debs, which are:

“While there is a lower class I am in it. While there is a criminal element I am of it. While there is a

soul in prison I am not free.”

I, Debs’ namesake, however, became anything but a bleeding heart. From the time I was 21 until I was

35 1 was a professional soldier, a Commissioned Officer in the United States Army. During those 14

years I would have killed Jesus Christ Himself or Herself or Itself or Whatever, if ordered to do so by a

superior officer. At the abrupt and humiliating and dishonorable end of the Vietnam War, I was a

Lieutenant Colonel, with I ,000s and 1 ,000s of my own inferiors.

During that war, which was about nothing but the ammunition business, there was a microscopic

possibility, I suppose, that I called in a white-phosphorus barrage or a napalm air strike on a returning

Jesus Christ.

I never wanted to be a professional soldier, although I turned out to be a good one, if there can be such

a thing. The idea that I should go to West Point came up as unexpectedly as the finale of the Vietnam

War, near the end of my senior year in high school. I was all set to

go to the University of Michigan, and take courses in English and History and Political Science, and work

on the student daily paper there in preparation for a career as a journalist.

But all of a sudden my father, who was a chemical engineer involved in making plastics with a half-life

of 50,000 years, and as full of excrement as a Christmas turkey, said I should go to West Point instead.

He had never been in the military himself. During World War II, he was too valuable as a civilian deep-

thinker about chemicals to be put in a soldier suit and turned into a suicidal, homicidal imbecile in 13

weeks.

I had already been accepted by the University of Michigan, when this offer to me of an appointment to

the United States Military Academy came out of the blue. The offer arrived at a low point in my father’s

life, when he needed something to boast about which would impress our simple-minded neighbors. They

would think an appointment to West Point was a great prize, like being picked for a professional baseball

team.

So he said to me, as I used to say to infantry replacements fresh off the boat or plane in Vietnam, “This

is a great opportunity.”

What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don’t mean

rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-way-twice music the American black people gave the world. I

played piano in my own all-white band in my all-white high school in Midland City, Ohio. We called

ourselves “The Soul Merchants.”

How good were we? We had to play white people’s popular music, or nobody would have hired us. But

every so often we would cut loose with jazz anyway.

Nobody else seemed to notice the difference, but we sure did. We fell in love with ourselves. We were in

ecstasy.

Father should never have made me go to West Point. Never mind what he did to the environment with

his nonbiodegradable plastics. Look what he did to me! What a boob he was! And my mother agreed with

every decision he ever made, which makes her another blithering nincompoop.

They were both killed 20 years ago in a freak accident in a gift shop on the Canadian side of Niagara

Falls, which the Indians in this valley used to call “Thunder Beaver,” when the roof fell in.

There are no dirty words in this book, except for “hell” and “God,” in case someone is fearing that an

innocent child might see 1. The expression I will use here and there for the end of the Vietnam War, for

example, will be: “when the excrement hit the air-conditioning.”

Perhaps the only precept taught me by Grandfather Wills that I have honored all my adult life is that

profanity and obscenity entitle people who don’t want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes

to you.

The more alert soldiers who served under me in Vietnam would comment in some amazement that I

never used profanity, which made me unlike anybody else they had ever met in the Army. They might ask

if this was because 1 was religious.

I would reply that religion had nothing to do with it. I am in fact pretty much an Atheist like my

mother’s father, although I kept that to myself. Why argue some-

body else out of the expectation of some sort of an Afterlife?

“I don’t use profanity,” I would say, “because your life and the lives of those around you may depend

on your understanding what I tell you. OK? OK?”

I resigned my commission in 1975, after the excrement hit the air-conditioning, not failing, however, to

father a son on my way home, unknowingly, during a brief stopover in the Philippines. I thought surely

that the subsequent mother, a young female war correspondent for The Des Moines Register, was using

foolproof birth control.

Wrong again!

Booby traps everywhere.

The biggest booby trap Fate set for me, though, was a pretty and personable young woman named

Margaret Patton, who allowed me to woo and marry her soon after my graduation from West Point, and

then had 2 children by me without telling me that there was a powerful strain of insanity on her

mother’s side of her famSo then her mother, who was living with us, went

insane, and then she herself went insane. Our children, moreover, had every reason to suspect that they,

too, might go crazy in middle age.

Our children, full-grown now, can never forgive us for reproducing. What a mess.

I realize that my speaking of my first and only wife as something as inhuman as a booby trap risks my

seeming to be yet another infernal device. But many other women have had no trouble relating to me as a

person,

and ardently, too, and my interest in them has gone well beyond the merely mechanical. Almost

invariably, I have been as enchanted by their souls, their intellects, and the stories of their lives as by their

amorous propensities.

But after I came home from the Vietnam War, and before either Margaret or her mother had shown me

and the children and the neighbors great big symptoms of their inherited craziness, that mother-daughter

team treated me like some sort of boring but necessary electrical appliance like a vacuum cleaner.

Good things have also happened unexpectedly, “manna from Heaven” you might want to call them, but

not in such quantities as to make life a bowl of cherries or anything approaching that. Right after my war,

when I had no idea what to do with the rest of my life, 1 ran into a former commanding officer of mine

who had become President of Tarkington College, in Scipio, New York. I was then only 35, and my wife

was still sane, and my mother-in-law was only slightly crazy. He offered me a teaching job, which I

accepted.

I could accept that job with a clear conscience, despite my lack of academic credentials beyond a mere

BS Degree from West Point, since all the students at larkington were learning-disabled in some way, or

plain stupid or comatose or whatever. No matter what the subject, my old CO assured me, I would have

little trouble keeping ahead of them.

The particular subject he wanted me to teach, what’s more, was 1 in which I had excelled at the

Academy, which was Physics.

The greatest stroke of luck for me, the biggest chunk of manna from Heaven, was that Tarkington had

need of somebody to play the Lutz Carillon, the great family of bells at the top of the tower of the college

library, where I am writing now.

I asked my old CO if the bells were swung by ropes. He said they used to be, but that they had been

electrified and were played by means of a keyboard now.

“What does the keyboard look like?” I said.

“Like a piano,” he said.

I had never played bells. Very few people have that clanging opportunity. But I could play a piano. So I said,

“Shake hands with your new carillonneur.”

The happiest moments in my life, without question, were when I played the Lutz Carillon at the start and

end of every day.

I went to work at Tarkington 25 years ago, and have lived in this beautiful valley ever since. This is home.

I have been a teacher here. I was a Warden for a little while, after Tarkington College officially became Tark-

ington State Reformatory in June of 1999, 20 months ago.

Now I myself am a prisoner here, but with pretty much the run of the place. I haven’t been convicted of

anything yet. I am awaiting trial, which I guess will take place in Rochester, for supposedly having master-

minded the mass prison break at the New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Institution at

Athena, across the lake from here.

It turns out that I also have tuberculosis, and my poor, addled wife Margaret and her mother have been put

by court order into a lunatic asylum in Batavia,

New York, something I had never had the guts to do. I am so powerless and despised now that the man I

am named after, Eugene Debs, if he were still alive, might at last be somewhat fond of me.

more optimistic times, when it was not widely understood that human beings were killing the planet

with the by-products of their own ingenuity and that a new Ice Age had begun in any case, the generic

name for the sort of horse-drawn covered wagon that carried freight and settlers across the prairies of

what was to become the United States of America, and eventually across the Rocky Mountains to the

Pacific Ocean, was “Conestoga”—since the first of these were built in the Conestoga Valley of

Pennsylvania.

They kept the pioneers supplied with cigars, among other things, so that cigars nowadays, in the year 2001,

are still called “stogies” sometimes, which is short for “Conestoga.”

By 1830, the sturdiest and most popular of these wagons were in fact made by the Mohiga Wagon Company

right here in Scipio, New York, at the pinched waist of Lake Mohiga, the deepest and coldest and

westernmost of the long and narrow Finger Lakes. So sophisticated cigar-smokers might want to stop calling

their stinkbombs “stogies” and call them “mogies” or “higgies” instead.

The founder of the Mohiga Wagon Company was Aaron Tarkington, a brilliant inventor and manufac-

turer who nevertheless could not read or write. He now would be identified as a blameless inheritor of the

genetic defect known as dyslexia. He said of himself that he was like the Emperor Charlemagne, “too

busy to learn to read and write.” He was not too busy, however, to have his wife read to him for 2 hours

every evening. He had an excellent memory, for he delivered weekly lectures to the workmen at the

factory that were laced with lengthy quotations from Shakespeare and Homer and the Bible, and on and

on.

He sired 4 children, a son and 3 daughters, all of whom could read and write. But they still carried the

gene of dyslexia, which would disqualify several of their own descendants from getting very far in

conventional schemes of education. Two of Aaron Tarkington’s children were so far from being dyslexic, in fact,

as to themselves write books, which I have read only now, and which nobody, probably, will ever read again.

Aaron’s only son, Elias, wrote a technical account of the construction of the Onondaga Canal, which con-

nected the northern end of Lake Mohiga to the Erie Canal just south of Rochester. And the youngest

daughter, Felicia, wrote a novel called Carpathia, about a headstrong, high-born young woman in the

Mohiga Valley who fell in love with a half-Indian lock-tender on that same canal.

That canal is all filled in and paved over now, and is Route 53, which forks at the head of the lake, where

the

locks used to be. One fork leads southwest through farm country to Scipio. The other leads southeast

through the perpetual gloom of the Iroquois National Forest to the bald hilltop crowned by the battlements of the

New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Institution at Athena, a hamlet directly across the lake from

Scipio.

Bear with me. This is history. I am trying to explain how this valley, this verdant cul-de-sac, got to be

what it is today.

All 3 of Aaron Tarkington’s daughters married into prosperous and enterprising families in Cleveland,

New York, and Wilmington, Delaware—innocently making the threat of dyslexia pandemic in an emerging ruling

class of bankers and industrialists, largely displaced in my time by Germans, Koreans, Italians, English,

and, of course, Japanese.

The son of Aaron, Elias, remained in Scipio and took over his father’s properties, adding to them a brewery

and a steam-driven carpet factory, the first such in the state. There was no water power in Scipio, whose industrial

prosperity until the introduction of steam was based not on cheap energy and locally available raw materials but on

inventiveness and high standards of workmanship.

Elias Tarkington never married. He was severely wounded at the age of 54 while a civilian observer at the

Battle of Gettysburg, top hat and all. He was there to see the debuts of 2 of his inventions, a mobile field

kitchen and a pneumatic recoil mechanism for heavy artillery. The field kitchen, incidentally, with slight

modifications, would later be adopted by the Barnum &

Bailey Circus, and then by the German Army during World War I.

Elias Tarkington was a tall and skinny man with chin whiskers and a stovepipe hat. He was shot through

the right chest at Gettysburg, but not fatally.

The man who shot him was I of the few Confederate soldiers to reach the Union lines during Pickett’s

Charge. That Johnny Reb died in ecstasy among his enemies, believing that he had shot Abraham Lincoln. A

crumbling newspaper account I have found here in what used to be the college library, which is now the

prison library, gives his last words as follows: “Go home, Bluebellies. Old Satan’s daid.”

During my 3 years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers.

Not 1 of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the

process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.

One boy of only 18 said to me while he was dying and I was holding him in my arms, “Dirty joke, dirty

joke.”

has Tarkington, the severely wounded Abraham Lincoln look-alike, was brought home in 1 of his own wagons

to Scipio, to his estate overlooking the town and lake.

He was not well educated, and was more a mechanic than a scientist, and so spent his last 3 years trying to

invent what anyone familiar with Newton’s Laws would have known was an impossibility, a perpetual-motion

machine. He had no fewer than 27 contraptions built, which he foolishly expected to go on running, after he had

given them an initial spin or whack, until Judgment Day.

I found 19 of those stubborn, mocking machines in the attic of what used to be their inventor’s mansion, which in

my time was the home of the College President, about a year after I came to work at Tarkington. I brought them

back downstairs and into the 20th Century. Some of my students and I cleaned them up and restored any parts that

had deteriorated during the intervening 100 years. At the least they were exquisite

jewelry, with gamets and amethysts for bearings, with arms and legs of exotic woods, with tumbling balls of ivory,

with chutes and counterweights of silver. It was as though dying Elias hoped to overwhelm science with the magic

of precious materials.

The longest my students and I could get the best of them to run was 51 seconds. Some eternity!

To me, and I passed this on to my students, the restored devices demonstrated not only how quickly anything on

Earth runs down without steady infusions of energy. They reminded us, too, of the craftsmanship no longer

practiced in the town below. Nobody down there in our time could make things that cunning and beautiful.

Yes, and we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent

exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet

nowadays:

THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE

I have discovered from reading old newspapers and letters and diaries from back then that the men who built

the machines for Elias Tarkington knew from the first that they would never work, whatever the reason. Yet what

love they lavished on the materials that comprised them! How is this for a definition of high art:

“Making the most of the raw materials of futility”?

Still another perpetual-motion machine envisioned by Elias Tarkington was what his Last Will and Testament

called “The Mohiga Valley Free Institute.” Upon

his death, this n~w school would take possession of his 3,000-hectare estate above Scipio, plus half the shares in

the wagon company, the carpet company, and the brewery. The other half was already owned by his sisters far away.

On his deathbed he predicted that Scipio would I day be a great metropolis and that its wealth would transform his

little college into a university to rival Harvard and Oxford and Heidelberg.

It was to offer a free college education to persons of either sex, and of any age or race or religion, living within 40

miles of Scipio. Those from farther away would pay a modest fee. In the beginning, it would have only 1 full-time

employee, the President. The teachers would be recruited right here in Scipio. They would take a few hours off

from work each week, to teach what they knew. The chief engineer at the wagon company, for example, whose

name was André Lutz, was a native of Liege, Belgium, and had served as an apprentice to a bell founder there. He

would teach Chemistry. His French wife would teach French and Watercolor Painting. The brewmaster at the

brewery, Hermann Shultz, a native of Leipzig, would teach Botany and German and the flute. The Episcopalian

priest, Dr. Alan Clewes, a graduate of Harvard, would teach Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and the Bible. The dying man’s

physician, Dalton Polk, would teach Biology and Shakespeare, and so on.

And it came to pass.

In 1869 the new college enrolled its first class, 9 students in all, and all from right here in Scipio. Four were of

ordinary college age. One was a Union veteran who had lost his legs at Shiloh. One was a former black slave 40

years old. One was a spinster 82 years old.

The first President was only 26 years old, a schoolteacher from Athena, 2 kilometers by water from Scipio. There

was no prison over there back then, but only a slate quarry and a sawmill and a few subsistence farms. His name was

John Peck. He was a cousin of the Tarkingtons’. His branch of the family, however, was and remains unhampered

by dyslexia. He has numerous descendants in the present day, 1 of whom, in fact, is a speech writer for the Vice-

President of the United States.

Young John Peck and his wife and 2 children and his mother-in-law arrived at Scipio by rowboat, with Peck and

his wife at the oars, their children seated in the stern, and their luggage and the mother-in-law in another boat they

towed behind.

They took up residence on the third floor of what had been Elias Tarkington’s mansion. The rooms on the first 2

floors would be classrooms, a library, which was already a library with 280 volumes collected by the Tarkingtons,

study halls, and a dining room. Many treasures from the past were taken up to the attic to make room for the new

activities. Among these were the failed perpetual-motion machines. They would gather dust and cobwebs until 1978,

when I found them up there, and realized what they were, and brought them down the stairs again.

One week before the first class was held, which was in Latin, taught by the Episcopalian priest Alan Clewes,

André Lutz the Belgian arrived at the mansion with 3 wagons carrying a very heavy cargo, a carillon consisting of

32 bells. He had cast them on his own time and at his own expense in the wagon factory’s foundry. They were made

from mingled Union and Confederate rifle

barrels and cannonballs and bayonets gathered up after the Battle of Gettysburg. They were the first bells and

surely the last bells ever to be cast in Scipio.

Nothing, in my opinion, will ever again be cast in Scipio. No industrial arts of any sort will ever again be

practiced here.

André Lutz gave the new college all those bells, even though there was no place to hang them. He said he did it

because he was so sure that it would 1 day be a great university with a bell tower and everything. He was dying of

emphysema as a result of the fumes from molten metals that he had been breathing since he was 10 years old. He

had no time to wait for a place to hang the most wonderful consequence of his having been alive for a little while,

which was all those bells, bells, bells.

They were no surprise. They had been 18 months in the making. The founders whose work he supervised had

shared his dreams of immortality as they made things as impractical and beautiful as bells, bells, bells.

So all the bells but I from a middle octave were slathered with grease to prevent their rusting and stored in 4

ranks in the estate’s great barn, 200 meters from the mansion. The I bell that was going to get to sing at once was

installed in the cupola of the mansion, with its rope running all the way down to the first floor. It would call people

to classes and, if need be, also serve as a fire alarm.

The rest of the bells, it turned out, would slumber in the loft for 30 years, until 1899, when they were hanged as a

family, the 1 from the cupola included, on axles in the belfry of the tower of a splendid library given to the school

by the Moellenkamp family of Cleveland.

The Moellenkamps were also Tarkingtons, since the

founder of their fortune had married a daughter of the illiterate Aaron Tarkington. Eleven of them so far

had been dyslexic, and they had all gone to college in Scipio, since no other institution of higher learning would

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HOCUSPOCUSKURT_VONNEGUTEDITOR’SNOTETheauthorofthisbookdidnothaveaccesstowritingpaperofuniformsizeandquality.Hewroteinalibraryhousingsomeeighthundredthousandvolumesofinteresttonooneelse.Mosthadneverbeenreadandprobablyneverwouldberead,sotherewasnothingtostophimfromtearingouttheirblankendpapersforstati...

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