Nothing in this book is true.
"Live by the foma* that makes you brave and kind and healthy and happy."
--The Books of Bokonon, 1:5
* Harmless untruths
Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
Jonah--John--if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still--not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there.
When I was a much younger man, I began to collect material for a book to be called The Day the World Ended.
It was to be a Christian book. I was a Christian then.
I am a Bokononist now.
I would have been a Bokononist then, if there had been anyone to teach me the bittersweet lies of Bokonon. But Bokononism was unknown beyond the gravel beaches and coral knives that ring this little island in the Caribbean Sea, the Republic of San Lorenzo.
We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon, and the instrument, the kan-kan, that brought me into my own particular karass was the book I never finished, the book to be called The Day the World Ended.
"If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass."
At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, "Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass." By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries.
It is as free-form as an amoeba.
In his "Fifty-third Calypso," Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:
Oh, a sleeping drunkard
Up in Central Park,
And a lion-hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a Chinese dentist,
And a British queen--
All fit together
In the same machine.
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice--
So many different people
In the same device.
Nowhere does Bokonon warn against a person's trying to discover the limits of his karass and the nature of the work God Almighty has had it do. Bokonon simply observes that such investigations are bound to be incomplete.
In the autobiographical section of The Books of Bokonon he writes a parable on the folly of pretending to discover, to understand:
I once knew an Episcopalian lady in Newport, Rhode Island, who asked me to design and build a doghouse for her Great Dane. The lady claimed to understand God and His Ways of Working perfectly. She could not understand why anyone should be puzzled about what had been or about what was going to be.
And yet, when I showed her a blueprint of the doghouse I proposed to build, she said to me, "I'm sorry, but I never could read one of those things."
"Give it to your husband or your minister to pass on to God," I said, "and, when God finds a minute, I'm sure he'll explain this doghouse of mine in a way that even you can understand."
She fired me. I shall never forget her. She believed that God liked people in sailboats much better than He liked people in motorboats. She could not bear to look at a worm. When she saw a worm, she screamed.
She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].
Be that as it may, I intend in this book to include as many members of my karass as possible, and I mean to examine all strong hints as to what on Earth we, collectively, have been up to.
I do not intend that this book be a tract on behalf of Bokononism. I should like to offer a Bokononist warning about it, however. The first sentence in The Books of Bokonon is this:
"All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies."
My Bokononist warning is this:
Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.
So be it.
About my karass, then.
It surely includes the three children of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the so-called "Fathers" of the first atomic bomb. Dr. Hoenikker himself was no doubt a member of my karass, though he was dead before my sinookas, the tendrils of my life, began to tangle with those of his children.
I made an appointment with Dr. Asa Breed, Vice-president in charge of the Research Laboratory of the General Forge and Foundry Company. I suppose Dr. Breed was a member of my karass, too, though he took a dislike to me almost immediately.
"Likes and dislikes have nothing to do with it," says Bokonon--an easy warning to forget.
As it happened--"as it was meant to happen," Bokonon would say--the whore next to me at the bar and the bartender serving me had both gone to high school with Franklin Hoenikker, the bug tormentor, the middle child, the missing son.
Ah, God, what an ugly city Ilium is!
"Ah, God," says Bokonon, "what an ugly city every city is!"
"Here, and shockingly few other places in this country, men are paid to increase knowledge, to work toward no end but that."
"That's very generous of General Forge and Foundry Company."
"Nothing generous about it. New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become."
Had I been a Bokononist then, that statement would have made me howl.
Which brings me to the Bokononist concept of a wampeter.
A wampeter is the pivot of a karass. No karass is without a wampeter, Bokonon tells us, just as no wheel is without a hub.
Anything can be a wampeter: a tree, a rock, an animal, an idea, a book, a melody, the Holy Grail. Whatever it is, the members of its karass revolve about it in the majestic chaos of a spiral nebula. The orbits of the members of a karass about their common wampeter are spiritual orbits, naturally. It is souls and not bodies that revolve. As Bokonon invites us to sing:
Around and around and around we spin,
With feet of lead and wings of tin.
And wampeters come and wampeters go, Bokonon tells us.
At any given time a karass actually has two wampeters--one waxing in importance, one waning.
And I am almost certain that while I was talking to Dr. Breed in Ilium, the wampeter of my karass that was just coming into bloom was that crystalline form of water, that blue-white gem, that seed of doom called ice-nine.
While I was talking to Dr. Breed in Ilium, Angela, Franklin, and Newton Hoenikker had in their possession seeds of ice-nine, seeds grown from their father's seed--chips, in a manner of speaking, off the old block.
What was to become of those three chips was, I am convinced, a principal concern of my karass.
"Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth."
"You don't seem to agree."
"I don't know whether I agree or not. I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person."
Miss Faust was ripe for Bokononism.
As we were leaving the cemetery the driver of the dab worried about the condition of his own mother's grave. He asked if I would mind taking a short detour to look at it.
It was a pathetic little stone that marked his mother--not that it mattered.
And the driver asked me if I would mind another brief detour, this time to a tombstone salesroom across the street from the cemetery.
I wasn't a Bokononist then, so I agreed with some peevishness. As a Bokononist, of course, I would have agreed gaily to go anywhere anyone suggested. As Bokonon says: "Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."
"Nobel Prize money bought it. Two things that money bought: a cottage on Cape Cod and that monument."
"Dynamite money," I marveled, thinking of the violence of dynamite and the absolute repose of a tombstone and a summer home.
"What?"
"Nobel invented dynamite."
"Well, I guess it takes all kinds . . ."
Had I been a Bokononist then, pondering the miraculously intricate chain of events that had brought dynamite money to that particular tombstone company, I might have whispered, "Busy, busy, busy."
Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
But all I could say as a Christian then was, "Life is sure funny sometimes."
"And sometimes it isn't," said Marvin Breed.
It was in the tombstone salesroom that I had my first vin-dit, a Bokononist word meaning a sudden, very personal shove in the direction of Bokononism, in the direction of believing that God Almighty knew all about me, after all, that God Almighty had some pretty elaborate plans for me.
The vin-dit had to do with the stone angel under the mistletoe. The cab driver had gotten it into his head that he had to have that angel for his mother's grave at any price. He was standing in front of it with tears in his eyes.
Marvin Breed nudged some of the boughs aside with his toe so that we could see the raised letters on the pedestal. There was a last name written there. "There's a screwy name for you," he said. "If that immigrant had any descendants, I expect they Americanized the name. They're probably Jones or Black or Thompson now."
"There you're wrong," I murmured.
The room seemed to tip, and its walls and ceiling and floor were transformed momentarily into the mouths of many tunnels--tunnels leading in all directions through time. I had a Bokononist vision of the unity in every second of all time and all wandering mankind, all wandering womankind, all wandering children.
"There you're wrong," I said, when the vision was gone.
"You know some people by that name?"
"Yes."
The name was my last name, too.
- Meow
During my trip to Ilium and to points beyond--a two-week expedition bridging Christmas--I let a poor poet named Sherman Krebbs have my New York City apartment free. My second wife had left me on the grounds that I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with.
Krebbs was a bearded man, a platinum blond Jesus with spaniel eyes. He was no close friend of mine. I had met him at a cocktail party where he presented himself as National Chairman of Poets and Painters for Immediate Nuclear War. He begged for shelter, not necessarily bomb proof, and it happened that I had some.
When I returned to my apartment, still twanging with the puzzling spiritual implications of the unclaimed stone angel in Ilium, I found my apartment wrecked by a nihilistic debauch. Krebbs was gone; but, before leaving, he had run up three-hundred-dollars' worth of long-distance calls, set my couch on fire in five places, killed my cat and my avocado tree, and torn the door off my medicine cabinet.
He wrote this poem, in what proved to be excrement, on the yellow linoleum floor of my kitchen:
I have a kitchen.
But it is not a complete kitchen.
I will not be truly gay
Until I have a
Dispose-all.
There was another message, written in lipstick in a feminine hand on the wallpaper over my bed. It said: "No, no, no, said Chicken-licken."
There was a sign hung around my dead cat's neck. It said, "Meow."
I have not seen Krebbs since. Nonetheless, I sense that he was my karass. If he was, he served it as a wrang-wrang. A wrang-wrang, according to Bokonon, is a person who steers people away from a line of speculation by reducing that line, with the example of the wrang-wrang's own life, to an absurdity.
I might have been vaguely inclined to dismiss the stone angel as meaningless, and to go from there to the meaningless of all. But after I saw what Krebbs had done, in particular what he had done to my sweet cat, nihilism was not for me.
Somebody or something did not wish me to be a nihilist. It was Krebbs's mission, whether he knew it or not, to disenchant me with that philosophy. Well, done, Mr. Krebbs, well done.
As it happened--"As it was supposed to happen," Bokonon would say--I was assigned by a magazine to do a story in San Lorenzo.
The seating on the airplane, bound ultimately for San Lorenzo from Miami, was three and three. As it happened--"As it was supposed to happen"--my seatmates were Horlick Minton, the new American Ambassador to the Republic of San Lorenzo, and his wife, Claire. They were whitehaired, gentle, and frail.
Minton told me that he was a career diplomat, holding the rank of Ambassador for the first time. He and his wife had so far served, he told me, in Bolivia, Chile, Japan, France, Yugoslavia, Egypt, the Union of South Africa, Liberia, and Pakistan.
They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by. They were, I think, a flawless example of what Bokonon calls a duprass, which is a karass composed of only two persons.
"A true duprass," Bokonon tells us, "can't be invaded, not even by children born of such a union."
I exclude the Mintons, therefore, from my own karass, from Frank's karass, from Newt's karass, from Asa Breed's karass, from Angela's karass, from Lyman Enders Knowles's karass, from Sherman Krebbs's karass. The Mintons' karass was a tidy one, composed of only two.
Bokonon tells us, incidentally, that members of a duprass always die within a week of each other. When it came time for the Mintons to die, they did it within the same second.
She smiled and let go of my arm. Some piece of clockwork had completed its cycle. My calling Hazel "Mom" had shut it off, and now Hazel was rewinding it for the next Hoosier to come along.
Hazel's obsession with Hossiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows--and any nation, anytime, anywhere.
As Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:
If you wish to study a _granfalloon_,
Just remove the skin of a toy balloon.
I opened the book to its title page and found that the name of the book was San Lorenzo: The Land, the History, the People. The author was Philip Castle, the son of Julian Castle, the hotel-keeping son of the great altruist I was on my way to see.
I let the book fall open where it would. As it happened, it fell open to the chapter about the island's outlawed holy man, Bokonon.
There was a quotation from The Books of Bokonon on the page before me. Those words leapt from the page and into my mind, and they were welcomed there.
The words were a paraphrase of the suggestion by Jesus: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's."
Bokonon's paraphrase was this:
"Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar dosen't have the slightest idea what's really going on."
But it was San Lorenzo--the land, the history, the people--that intrigued me then, so I looked no harder for the midget. Midgets are, after all, diversions for silly or quiet times, and I was serious and excited about Bokonon's theory of what he called "Dynamic Tension," his sense of a priceless equilibrium between good and evil.
When I first saw the term "Dynamic Tension" in Philip Castle's book, I laughed what I imagined to be a superior laugh. The term was a favorite of Bokonon's, according to young Castle's book, and I supposed that I knew something that Bokonon didn't know: that the term was one vulgarized by Charles Atlas, a mail-order muscle-builder.
As I learned when I read on, briefly, Bokonon knew exactly who Charles Atlas was. Bokonon was, in fact, an alumnus of his muscle-building school.
It was the belief of Charles Atlas that muscles could be built without bar bells or spring exercisers, could be built by simply pitting one set of muscles against another.
It was the belief of Bokonon that good societies could be built only by pitting good against evil, and by keeping the tension between the two high at all times.
And, in Castle's book, I read my first Bokononist poem, or "Calypso." It went like this:
"Papa" Monzano, he's so very bad,
But without bad "Papa" I would be so sad;
Because without "Papa's" badness,
Tell me, if you would,
How could wicked old Bokonon
Ever, ever look good?
Bokonon, I learned from Castle's book, was born in 1891. He was a Negro, born an Episcopalian and a British subject on the island of Tobago.
He was christened Lionel Boyd Johnson.
He was the youngest of six children, born to a wealthy family. His family's wealth derived from the discovery by Bokonon's grandfather of one quarter of a million dollars in buried pirate treasure, presumably a treasure of Blackbeard, of Edward Teach.
Blackbeard's treasure was reinvested by Bokonon's family in asphalt, copra, cocoa, livestock, and poultry.
Young Lionel Boyd Johnson was educated in Episcopal schools, did well as a student, and was more interested in ritual than most. As a youth, for all his interest in the outward trappings of organized religion, he seems to have been a carouser, for he invites us to sing along with him in his "Fourteenth Calypso":
When I was young,
I was so gay and mean,
And I drank and chased the girls
Just like young St. Augustine.
Saint Augustine,
He got to be a saint.
So, if I get to be one, also,
Please, Mama, don't you faint.
Lionel Boyd Johnson was intellectually ambitious enough, in 1911, to sail alone from Tobago to London in a sloop named the Lady's Slipper. His purpose was to gain a higher education.
He enrolled in the London School of Economics and Political Science.
His education was interrupted by the First World War. He enlisted in the infantry, fought with distinction, was commissioned in the field, was mentioned four times in dispatches. He was gassed in the second Battle of Ypres, was hospitalized for two years, and then discharged.
And he set sail for home, for Tobago, alone in the Lady's Slipper again.
When only eighty miles from home, he was stopped and searched by a German submarine, the U-99. He was taken prisoner, and his little vessel was used by the Huns for target practice. While still surfaced, the submarine was surprised and captured by the British destroyer, the Raven.
Johnson and the Germans were taken on board the destroyer and the U-99 was sunk.
The Raven was bound for the Mediterranean, but it never got there. It lost its steering; it could only wallow helplessly or make grand, clockwise circles. It came to rest at last in the Cape Verde Islands.
Johnson stayed in those islands for eight months, awaiting some sort of transportation to the Western Hemisphere.
He got a job at last as a crewman on a fishing vessel that was carrying illegal immigrants to New Bedford, Massachusetts. The vessel was blown ashoer at Newport, Rhode Island.
By that time Johnson had developed a conviction that something was trying to get him somewhere for some reason. So he stayed in Newport for a while to see if he had a destiny there. He worked as a gardener and carpenter on the famous Rumfoord Estate.
During that time, he glimpsed many distinguished guests of the Rumfoords, among them, J. P. Morgan, General John J. Pershing, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Enrico Caruso, Warren Gamaliel Harding, and Harry Houdini. And it was during that time that the First World War came to an end, having killed ten million persons and wounded twenty million, Johnson among them.
When the war ended, the young rakehell of the Rumfoord family, Remington Rumfoord, IV, proposed to sail his steam yacht, the Scheherazade, around the world, visiting Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Egypt, India, China, and Japan. He invited Johnson to accompany him as first mate, and Johnson agreed.
Johnson saw many wonders of the world on the voyage. The Scheherazade was rammed in a fog in Bombay harbor, and only Johnson survived. He stayed in India for two years, becoming a follower of Mohandas K. Ghandi. He was arrested for leading groups that protested British rule by lying down on railroad tracks. When his jail term was over, he was shipped at Crown expense to his home in Tobago.
There, he built another schooner, which he called the Lady's Slipper II.
And he sailed her about the Caribbean, an idler, still seeking the storm that would drive him ashore on what was unmistakably his destiny.
In 1922, he sought shelter from a hurricane in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, which country was then occupied by United States Marines.
Johnson was approached there by a brilliant, self-educated, idealistic Marine deserter named Earl McCabe. McCabe was a corporal. He had just stolen his company's recreation fund. He offered Johnson five hundred dollars for transportation to Miami.
The two set sail for Miami.
But a gale hounded the schooner onto the rocks of San Lorenzo. The boat went down. Johnson and McCabe, absolutely naked, managed to swim ashore. As Bokonon himself reports the adventure:
A fish pitched up
By the angry sea,
I gasped on land,
And I became me.
He was enchanted by the mystery of coming ashore naked on an unfamiliar island. He resolved to let the adventure run its full course, resolved to see just how far a man might go, emerging naked from salt water.
It was a rebirth for him:
Be like a baby,
The Bible say,
So I stay like a baby
To this very day.
How he came by the name of Bokonon was very simple. "Bokonon" was the pronunciation given the name Johnson in the island's English dialect.
Shortly after Johnson became Bokonon, incidentally, the lifeboat of his shattered ship was found on shore. That boat was later painted gold and made the bed of the island's chief executive.
"There is a legend, made up by Bokonon," Philip Castle wrote in his book, "that the golden boat will sail again when the end of the world is near."
"He's insecure."
"What mortal isn't?" I demanded. I didn't know it then, but that was a very Bokononist thing to demand.
A duprass, Bokonon tells us, is a valuable instrument for gaining and developing, in the privacy of an interminable love affair, insights that are queer but true. The Mintons' cunning exploration of indexes was surely a case in point. A duprass, Bokonon tells us, is also a sweetly conceited establishment. The Mintons' establishment was no exception.
When Lionel Boyd Johnson and Corporal Earl McCabe were washed up naked onto the shore of San Lorenzo, I read, they were greeted by persons far worse off than they. The people of San Lorenzo had nothing but diseases, which they were at a loss to treat or even name. By contrast, Johnson and McCabe had the glittering treasures of literacy, ambition, curiosity, gall, irreverence, health, humor, and considerable information about the outside world.
From the "Calypsos" again:
Oh, a very sorry people, yes
Did I find here.
Oh, they had no music,
And they had no beer.
And, oh, everywhere
Where they tried to perch
Belonged to Castle Sugar, Incorporated,
Or the Catholic church.
This statement of the property situation in San Lorenzo in 1922 is entirely accurate, according to Philip Castle. Castle Sugar was founded, as it happened, by Philip Castle's great-grandfather. In 1922, it owned every piece of arable land on the island.
"Castle Sugar's San Lorenzo operations," wrote young Castle, "never showed a profit. But, by paying laborers nothing for their labor, the company managed to break even year after year, making just enough money to pay the salaries of the workers' tormentors.
"The form of government was anarchy, save in limited situations wherein Castle Sugar wanted to own something or to get something done. In such situations the form of government was feudalism. The nobility was composed of Castle Sugar's plantation bosses, who were heavily armed white men from the outside world. The knighthood was composed of big natives who, for small gifts and silly privileges, would kill or wound or torture on command. The spiritual needs of the people caught in this demoniacal squirrel cage were taken care of by a handful of butterball priests.
"The San Lorenzo Cathedral, dynamited in 1923, was generally regarded as one of the man-made wonders of the New World," wrote Castle.
That Corporal McCabe and Johnson were able to take command of San Lorenzo was not a miracle in any sense. Many people had taken over San Lorenzo--had invariable found it lightly held. The reason was simple: God, in His Infinite Wisdom, had made the island worthless.
Hernando Cortes was the first man to have his sterile conquest of San Lorenzo recorded on paper. Cortes and his men came ashore for fresh water in 1519, named the island, claimed it for Emperor Charles the Fifth, and never returned. Subsequent expeditions came for gold and diamonds and rubies and spices, found none, burned a few natives for entertainment and heresy, and sailed on.
"When France claimed San Lorenzo in 1682," wrote Castle, "no Spaniards complained. When Denmark claimed San Lorenzo in 1699, no Frenchmen complained. When the Dutch claimed San Lorenzo in 1704, no Danes complained. When England claimed San Lorenzo in 1706, no Dutchmen complained. When Spain reclaimed San Lorenzo in 1720, no Englishmen complained. When, in 1786, African Negroes took command of a British slave ship, ran it ashore on San Lorenzo, and proclaimed San Lorenzo an independent nation, an empire with an emperor, in fact, no Spaniards complained.
"The emperor was Tum-bumwa, the only person who ever regarded the island as being worth defending. A maniac, Tum-bumwa caused to be erected the San Lorenzo Cathedral and the fantastic fortifications on the north shore of the island, fortifications within which the private residence of the so-called President of the Republic now stands.
"The fortifications have never been attacked, nor has any sane man ever proposed any reason why they should be attacked. They have never defended anything. Fourteen hundred persons are said to have died while building them. Of these fourteen hundred, about half are said to have been executed in public for substandard zeal."
Castle Sugar came into San Lorenzo in 1916, during the sugar boom of the First World War. There was no government at all. The company imagined that even the clay and gravel fields of San Lorenzo could be tilled profitably, with the price of sugar so high. No one complained.
When McCabe and Johnson arrived in 1922 and announced that they were placing themselves in charge, Castle Sugar withdrew flaccidly, as though from a queasy dream.
"There was at least one quality of the new conquerors of San Lorenzo that was really new," wrote young Castle. "McCabe and Johnson dreamed of making San Lorenzo a Utopia.
"To this end, McCabe overhauled the economy and the laws.
"Johnson designed a new religion."
Castle quoted the "Calypsos" again:
I wanted all things
To seem to make some sense,
So we all could be happy, yes,
Instead of tense.
And I made up lies
So that they all fit nice,
And I made this sad world
A par-a-dise.
The shed was neat and new, but plenty of signs had already been slapped on the walls, higgledy-piggledy.
ANYBODY CAUGHT PRACTICING BOKONONISM IN SAN LORENZO, said one, WILL DIE ON THE HOOK!
Another poster featured a picture of Bokonon, a scrawny old colored man who was smoking a cigar. He looked clever and kind and amused.
Under the picture were the words: WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE, 10,000 CORPORALS REWARD!
I took a closer look at that poster and found reproduced at the bottom of it some sort of police identification form Bokonon had had to fill out way back in 1929. It was reproduced, apparently, to show Bokonon hunters what his fingerprints and handwriting were like.
But what interested me were some of the words Bokonon had chosen to put into the blanks in 1929. Wherever possible, he had taken the cosmic view, had taken into consideration, for instance, such things as the shortness of life and the longness of eternity.
He reported his avocation as: "Being alive."
He reported his principal occupation as: "Being dead."
THIS IS A CHRISTIAN NATION! ALL FOOT PLAY WILL BE PUNISHED BY THE HOOK, said another sign. The sign was meaningless to me, since I had not yet learned that Bokononists mingled their souls by pressing the bottoms of their feet together.
And the greatest mystery of all, since I had not read all of Philip Castle's book, was how Bokonon, bosom friend of Corporal McCabe, had come to be an outlaw.
At a limp, imperious signal from "Papa," the crowd sang the San Lorenzan National Anthem. Its melody was "Home on the Range." The words had been written in 1922 by Lionel Boyd Johnson, by Bokonon. The words were these:
Oh, ours is a land
Where the living is grand,
And the men are as fearless as sharks;
The women are pure,
And we always are sure
That our children will all toe their marks.
San, San Lo-ren-zo!
What a rich, lucky island are we!
Our enemies quail,
For they know they will fail
Against people so reverent and free.
That girl--and she was only eighteen--was rapturously serene. She seemed to understand all, and to be all there was to understand. In The Books of Bokonon she is mentioned by name. One thing Bokonon says of her is this: "Mona has the simplicity of the all."
The Crosbys got their answer first. They could not understand the San Lorenzan dialect, so I had to translate for them. Crosby's basic question to our driver was: "Who the hell is this pissant Bokonon, anyway?"
"Very bad man," said the driver. What he actually said was, "Vorry ball moan."
"A Communist?" asked Crosby, when he heard my translation.
"Oh, sure."
"Has he got any following?"
"Sir?"
"Does anybody think he's any good?"
"Oh, no, sir," said the driver piously. "Nobody that crazy."
"Why hasn't he been caught?" demanded Crosby.
"Hard man to find," said the driver. "Very smart."
"Well, people must be hiding him and giving him food or he'd be caught by now."
"Nobody hide him; nobody feed him. Everybody too smart to do that."
"You sure?"
"Oh, sure," said the driver. "Anybody feed that crazy old man, anybody give him place to sleep, they get the hook. Nobody want the hook."
He pronounced that last word: "hy-u-o-ook-kuh."
"Father needs some kind of book to read to people who are dying or in terrible pain. I don't suppose you've written anything like that."
"Not yet."
"I think there'd be money in it. There's another valuable tip for you."
"I suppose I could overhaul the 'Twenty-third Psalm,' switch it around a little so nobody would realize it wasn't original with me."
"Bokonon tried to overhaul it," he told me. "Bokonon found out he couldn't change a word."
"You know him, too?"
"That happiness is mine. He was my tutor when I was a little boy." He gestured sentimentally at the mosaic. "He was Mona's tutor, too."
"Was he a good teacher?"
"Mona and I can both read and write and do simple sums," said Castle, "if that's what you mean."
I went to this door and found a large suite paved with drop-cloths. It was being painted, but the two painters weren't painting when I appeared. They were sitting on a shelf that ran the width of the window wall.
They had their shoes off. They had their eyes closed. They were facing each other.
They were pressing the soles of their bare feet together.
Each grasped his own ankles, giving himself the rigidity of a triangle.
I cleared my throat.
The two rolled off the shelf and fell to the spattered dropcloth. They landed on their hands and knees, and they stayed in that position--their behinds in the air, their noses close to the ground.
They were expecting to be killed.
"Excuse me," I said, amazed.
"Don't tell," begged one querulously. "Please--please don't tell."
"Tell what?"
"What you saw!"
"I didn't see anything."
"If you tell," he said, and he put his cheek to the floor and looked up at me beseechingly, "if you tell, we'll die on the hy-u-o-ook-kuh!"
"Look, friends," I said, "either I came in too early or too late, but, I tell you again, I didn't see anything worth mentioning to anybody. Please--get up."
They got up, their eyes still on me. They trembled and cowered. I convinced them at last that I would never tell what I had seen.
What I had seen, of course, was the Bokononist ritual of boko-maru, or the mingling of awarenesses.
We Bokononists believe that it is impossible to be sole-to-sole with another person without loving the person, provided the feet of both persons are clean and nicely tended.
The basis for the foot ceremony is this "Calypso":
We will touch our feet, yes,
Yes, for all we're worth,
And we will love each other, yes,
Yes, like we love our Mother Earth.
"'Papa' doesn't like the way we treat the whole patient," said Castle, "particularly the whole patient when he's dying. At the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle, we administer the last rites of the Bokononist Church to those who want them."
"What are the rites like?"
"Very simple. They start with a responsive reading. You want to respond?"
"I'm not that close to death just now, if you don't mind."
He gave me a grisly wink. "You're wise to be cautious. People taking the last rites have a way of dying on cue. I think we could keep you from going all the way, though, if we didn't touch feet."
"Feet?"
He told me about the Bokononist attitude relative to feet.
"That explains something I saw in the hotel." I told him about the two painters on the window sill.
"It works, you know," he said. "People who do that really do feel better about each other and the world."
"Um."
"Boko-maru."
"Sir?"
"That's what the foot business is called," said Castle. "It works. I'm grateful for things that work. Not many things do work, you know."
"I suppose not."
"I couldn't possibly run that hospital of mine if it weren't for aspirin and boko-maru."
"I gather," I said, "that there are still several Bokononists on the island, despite the laws, despite the hy-u-o-ook-kuh . . ."
He laughed. "You haven't caught on, yet?"
"To what?"
"Everybody on San Lorenzo is a devout Bokononist, the hy-u-o-ook-kuh notwithstanding."
"When Bokonon and McCabe took over this miserable country years ago," said Julian Castle, "they threw out the priests. And then Bokonon, cynically and playfully, invented a new religion."
"I know," I said.
"Well, when it became evident that no governmental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies."
"How did he come to be an outlaw?"
"It was his own idea. He asked McCabe to outlaw him and his religion, too, in order to give the religious life of the people more zest, more tang. He wrote a little poem about it, incidentally."
Castle quoted this poem, which does not appear in The Books of Bokonon:
So I said good-bye to government,
And I gave my reason:
That a really good religion
Is a form of treason.
"Bokonon suggested the hook, too, as the proper punishment for Bokononists," he said. "It was something he'd seen in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's." He winked ghoulishly. "That was for zest, too."
"Did many people die on the hook?"
"Not at first, not at first. At first it was all make-believe. Rumors were cunningly circulated about executions, but no one really knew anyone who had died that way. McCabe had a good old time making bloodthirsty threats against the Bokononists--which was everybody.
"And Bokonon went into cozy hiding in the jungle," Castle continued, "where he wrote and preached all day long and ate good things his disciples brought him.
"McCabe would organize the unemployed, which was practically everybody, into great Bokonon hunts.
"About every six months McCabe would announce triumphantly that Bokonon was surrounded by a ring of steel, which was remorselessly closing in.
"And then the leaders of the remorseless ring would have to report to McCabe, full of chagrin and apoplexy, that Bokonon had done the impossible.
"He had escaped, had evaporated, had lived to preach another day. Miracle!"
"McCabe and Bokonon did not succeed in raising what is generally thought of as the standard of living," said Castle. "The truth was that life was as short and brutish and mean as ever.
"But people didn't have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud."
"So life became a work of art," I marveled.
"Yes. There was only one trouble with it."
"Oh?"
"The drama was very tough on the souls of the two main actors, McCabe and Bokonon. As young men, they had been pretty much alike, had both been half-angel, half-pirate.
"But the drama demanded that the pirate half of Bokonon and the angel half of McCabe wither away. And McCabe and Bokonon paid a terrible price in agony for the happiness of the people--McCabe knowing the agony of the tyrant and Bokonon knowing the agony of the saint. They both became, for all practical purposes, insane."
Castle crooked the index finger of his left hand. "And then, people really did start dying on the hy-u-o-ook-kuh."
"But Bokonon was never caught?" I asked.
"McCabe never went that crazy. He never made a really serious effort to catch Bokonon. It would have been easy to do."
"Why didn't he catch him?"
"McCabe was always sane enough to realize that without the holy man to war against, he himself would become meaningless. 'Papa' Monzano understands that, too."
"Do people still die on the hook?"
"It's inevitably fatal."
"I mean," I said, "does 'Papa' really have people executed that way?"
"He executes one every two years--just to keep the pot boiling, so to speak." He sighed, looking up at the evening sky. "Busy, busy, busy."
"Sir?"
"It's what we Bokononists say," he said, "when we feel that a lot of mysterious things are going on."
"You?" I was amazed. "A Bokononist, too?"
He gazed at me levelly. "You, too. You'll find out."
Castle quoted another poem:
Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, "Why, why, why?"
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.
"What's that from?" I asked.
"What could it possibly be from but The Books of Bokonon?"
"I'd love to see a copy sometime."
"Copies are hard to come by," said Castle. "They aren't printed. They're made by hand. And, of course, there is no such thing as a completed copy, since Bokonon is adding things every day."
Little Newt snorted. "Religion!"
"Beg your pardon?" Castle said.
"See the cat?" asked Newt. "See the cradle?"
"I'd appreciate it if you'd give me some small hint of what you expect me to do--so I can sort of get set," I said.
"Zah-mah-ki-bo."
"What?"
"It's a Bokononist word."
"I don't know any Bokononist words."
"Julian Castle's there?"
"Yes."
"Ask him," said Frank. "I've got to go now." He hung up. So I asked Julian Castle what zah-mah-ki-bo meant.
"You want a simple answer or a whole answer?"
"Let's start with a simple one."
"Fate--inevitable destiny."
Frank's servants brought us gasoline lanterns; told us that power failures were common in San Lorenzo, that there was no cause for alarm. I found that disquiet was hard for me to set aside, however, since Frank had spoken of my zah-mah-ki-bo.
He had made me feel as though my own free will were as irrelevant as the free will of a piggy-wig arriving at the Chicago stockyards.
I remembered again the stone angel in Ilium.
And I listened to the soldiers outside--to their clinking, chunking, murmuring labors.
I excused myself from the glittering company, and I asked Stanley, the major-domo, if there happened to be a copy of The Books of Bokonon about the house.
Stanley pretended not to know what I was talking about. And then he grumbled that The Books of Bokonon were filth. And then he insisted that anyone who read them should die on the hook. And then he brought me a copy from Frank's bedside table.
It was a heavy thing, about the size of an unabridged dictionary. It was written by hand. I trundled it off to my bedroom, to my slab of rubber on living rock.
There was no index, so my search for the implications of zah-mah-ki-bo was difficult; was, in fact, fruitless that night.
I learned some things, but they were scarcely helpful. I learned of the Bokononist cosmogony, for instance, wherein Borasis, the sun, held Pabu, the moon, in his arms, and hoped that Pabu would bear him a fiery child.
But poor Pabu herself was cast away, and she went to live with her favorite child, which was Earth. Earth was Pabu's favorite because it had people on it; and the people looked up at her and loved her and sympathized.
And what opinion did Bokonon hold of his own cosmogony?
"Foma! Lies!" he wrote. "A pack of foma!"
He faced the sheet of water that curtained the cave. "Maturity, the way I understand it," he told me, "is knowing what your limitations are."
He wasn't far from Bokonon in defining maturity. "Maturity," Bokonon tells us, "is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything."
"You'll take the job?" Frank inquired anxiously.
"No," I told him.
"Do you know anybody who might want the job?" Frank was giving a classic illustration of what Bokonon calls duffle. Duffle, in the Bokononist sense, is the destiny of thousands upon thousands of persons when placed in the hands of a stuppa. A stuppa is a fogbound child.
"You mean you had some premonition you'd end up here?" It was a Bokononist question.
And the time of night and the cave and the waterfall--and the stone angel in Ilium . . .
And 250,000 cigarettes and 3,000 quarts of booze, and two wives and no wife . . .
And no love waiting for me anywhere . . .
And the listless life of an ink-stained hack . . .
And Pabu, the moon, and Borasisi, the sun, and their children . . .
All things conspired to form one cosmic vin-dit, one mighty shove into Bokononism, into the belief that God was running my life and that He had work for me to do. And, inwardly, I sarooned, which is to say that I acquiesced to the seeming demands of my vin-dit.
Inwardly, I agreed to become the next President of San Lorenzo.
"Why would she say yes?"
"It's predicted in The Books of Bokonon that she'll marry the next President of San Lorenzo," said Frank.
"How--how do you do?" I asked. My heart was pounding. Blood boiled in my ears.
"It is not possible to make a mistake," she assured me. I did not know that this was a customary greeting given by all Bokononists when meeting a shy person. So, I responded with a feverish discussion of whether it was possible to make a mistake or not.
I got off the floor, sat in a chair, and started putting my shoes and socks back on.
"I suppose you--you perform--you do what we just did with--with other people?"
"Boko-maru?"
"Boko-maru."
"Of course."
"I don't want you to do it with anybody but me from now on," I declared.
Tears filled her eyes. She adored her promiscuity; was angered that I should try to make her feel shame. "I make people happy. Love is good, not bad."
"As your husband, I'll want all your love for myself."
She stared at me with widening eyes. "A sin-wat!"
"What was that?"
"A sin-wat!" she cried. "A man who wants all of somebody's love. That's very bad."
"In the case of marriage, I think it's a very good thing. It's the only thing."
"I suppose there was plenty of boko-maruing in those days."
"Oh, yes!" she said happily.
"You aren't to see him any more, either. Is that clear?"
"No."
"No?"
"I will not marry a sin-wat." She stood. "Good-bye."
"Good-bye?" I was crushed.
"Bokonon tells us it is very wrong not to love everyone exactly the same. What does your religion say?"
"I--I don't have one."
"I do."
I had stopped ruling. "I see you do," I said.
"Good-bye, man-with-no-religion." She went to the stone staircase.
"Mona . . ."
She stopped. "Yes?"
"Could I have your religion, if I wanted it?"
"Of course."
"I want it."
"Good. I love you."
"And I love you," I sighed.
"Is it sacred or something?" I asked.
"Maybe it was once. But not since Bokonon."
"Then why hasn't anybody climbed it?"
"Nobody's felt like it yet."
"Maybe I'll climb it."
"Go ahead. Nobody's stopping you."
We rode in silence.
"What is sacred to Bokononists?" I asked after a while.
"Not even God, as near as I can tell."
"Nothing?"
"Just one thing."
I made some guesses. "The ocean? The sun?"
"Man," said Frank. "That's all. Just man."
"Doesn't matter! Bokonon. Get Bokonon."
I attempted a sophisticated reply to this last. I remembered that, for the joy of the people, Bokonon was always to be chased, was never to be caught. "I will get him."
"Tell him . . ."
I leaned closer, in order to hear the message from "Papa" to Bokonon.
"Tell him I am sorry I did not kill him," said "Papa."
"I will."
"You kill him."
"Yessir."
"Papa" gained control enough of his voice to make it commanding. "I mean really!"
I said nothing to that. I was not eager to kill anyone.
"He teaches the people lies and lies and lies. Kill him and teach the people truth."
"Yessir."
"You and Hoenikker, you teach them science."
"Yessir, we will," I promised.
"Science is magic that works."
He fell silent, relaxed, closed his eyes. And then he whispered, "Last rites."
Von Koenigswald called Dr. Vox Humana in. Dr. Humana took his tranquilized chicken out of the hatbox, preparing to administer Christian last rites as he understood them.
"Papa" opened one eye. "Not you," he sneered at Dr. Humana. "Get out!"
"Sir?" asked Dr. Humana.
"I am a member of the Bokononist faith," "Papa" wheezed. "Get out, you stinking Christian."
So I was privileged to see the last rites of the Bokononist faith.
We made an effort to find someone among the soldiers and the household staff who would admit that he knew the rites and would give them to "Papa." We got no volunteers. That was hardly surprising, with a hook and an oubliette so near.
So Dr. von Koenigswald said that he would have a go at the job. He had never administered the rites before, but he had seen Julian Castle do it hundreds of times.
"Are you a Bokononist?" I asked him.
"I agree with one Bokononist idea. I agree that all religions, including Bokononism, are nothing but lies."
"Will this bother you as a scientist," I inquired, "to go through a ritual like this?"
"I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific. No scientist worthy of the name could say such a thing."
And he climbed into the golden boat with "Papa." He sat in the stern. Cramped quarters obliged him to have the golden tiller under one arm.
He wore sandals without socks, and he took these off. And then he rolled back the covers at the foot of the bed, exposing "Papa's" bare feet. He put the soles of his feet against "Papa's" feet, assuming the classical position for boko-maru.
"Gott mate mutt," crooned Dr. von Koenigswald.
"Dyot meet mat," echoed "Papa" Monzano.
"God made mud," was what they'd said, each in his own dialect. I will here abandon the dialects of the litany.
"God got lonesome," said Von Koenigswald.
"God got lonesome."
"So God said to some of the mud, 'Sit up!'"
"So God said to some of the mud, 'Sit up!'"
"'See all I've made,' said God, 'the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.'"
"'See all I've made,' said God, 'the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.'"
"And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around."
"And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around."
"Lucky me; lucky mud."
"Lucky me; lucky mud." Tears were streaming down "Papa's" cheeks.
"I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done."
"I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done."
"Nice going, God!"
"Nice going, God!" "Papa" said it with all his heart.
"Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have."
"Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have."
"I feel very unimportant compared to You."
"I feel very unimportant compared to You."
"The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around."
"The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around."
"I got so much, and most mud got so little."
"I got so much, and most mud got so little."
"Deng you vore da on-oh!" cried Von Koenigswald.
"Tz-yenk voo vore lo yon-yo!" wheezed "Papa."
What they had said was, "Thank you for the honor!"
"Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep."
"Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep."
"What memories for mud to have!"
"What memories for mud to have!"
"What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!"
"What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!"
"I loved everything I saw!"
"I loved everything I saw!"
"Good night."
"Good night."
"I will go to heaven now."
"I will go to heaven now."
"I can hardly wait . . ."
"I can hardly wait . . ."
"To find out for certain what my wampeter was . . ."
"To find out for certain what my wampeter was . . ."
"And who was in my karass . . ."
"And who was in my karass . . ."
"And all the good things our karass did for you."
"And all the good things our karass did for you."
"Amen."
"Amen."
So I wrote my speech in a round, bare room at the foot of a tower. There was a table and a chair. And the speech I wrote was round and bare and sparesly furnished, too.
It was hopeful. It was humble.
And I found it impossible not to lean on God. I had never needed such support before, and so had never believed that such support was available.
Now, I found that I had to believe in it--and I did.
In addition, I would need the help of people. I called for a list of the guests who were to be at the ceremonies and found that Julian Castle and his son had not been invited. I sent messengers to invite them at once, since they knew more about my people than anyone, with the exception of Bokonon.
As for Bokonon:
I pondered asking him to join my government, thus bringing about a sort of millennium for my people. And I thought of ordering that the awful hook outside the palace gate be taken down at once, amidst great rejoicing.
But then I understood that a millennium would have to offer something more than a holy man in a position of power, that there would have to be plenty of good things for all to eat, too, and nice places to live for all, and good schools and good health and good times for all, and work for all who wanted it--things Bokonon and I were in no position to provide.
So good and evil had to remain separate; good in the jungle, and evil in the palace. Whatever entertainment there was in that was about all we had to give the people.
When I think of all those people on my uppermost battlement, I think of Bokonon's "hundredth-and-nineteenth Calypso," wherein he invites us to sing along with him:
"Where's my good old gang done gone?"
I heard a sad man say.
I whispered in that sad man's ear,
"Your gang's done gone away."
Present were Ambassador Horlick Minton and his lady; H. Lowe Crosby, the bicycle manufacturer, and his Hazel; Dr. Julian Castle, humanitarian and philanthropist, and his son Philip, author and innkeeper; little Newton Hoenikker, the picture painter, and his musical sister, Mrs. Harrison C. Conners; my heavenly Mona; Major General Franklin Hoenikker; and twenty assorted San Lorenzo bureaucrats and military men.
Dead--almost all dead now.
As Bokonon tells us, "It is never a mistake to say goodbye."
Did she represent the highest form of female spirituality?
Or was she anesthetized, frigid--a cold fish, in fact, a dazed addict of the xylophone, the cult of beauty, and boko-maru?
I shall never know.
Bokonon tells us:
A lover's a liar,
To himself he lies.
The truthful are loveless,
Like oysters their eyes!
So my instructions are clear, I suppose. I am to remember my Mona as having been sublime.
I excused myself and I rejoined the Crosbys.
Frank Hoenikker was with them, explaining who Bokonon was and what he was against. "He's against science."
As it happened--"As it was supposed to happen," Bokonon would say--albatross meat disagreed with me so violently that I was ill the moment I'd choked the first piece down.
And "Papa's" lips and nostrils and eyeballs were glazed with a blue-white frost.
Such a syndrome is no novelty now, God knows. But it certainly was then. "Papa" Monzano was the first man in history to die of ice-nine.
I record that fact for whatever it may be worth. "Write it all down," Bokonon tells us. He is really telling us, of course, how futile it is to write or read histories. "Without accurate records of the past, how can men and women be expected to avoid making serious mistakes in the future?" he asks ironically.
"Pain, ice, Mona--everything. And then 'Papa' said, 'Now I will destroy the whole world.'"
"What did he mean by that?"
"It's what Bokononists always say when they are about to commit suicide."
So I snarled at all three, calling them to account for monstrous calamity. I told them that the jig was up, that I knew about them and ice-nine. I tried to alarm them about ice-nine's being a means to ending life on earth. I was so impressive that they never thought to ask how I knew about ice-nine.
Well, as Bokonon tells us: "God never wrote a good play in His Life." The scene in "Papa's" room did not lack for spectacular issues and props, and my opening speech was the right one.
But the first reply from a Hoenikker destroyed all magnificence.
Little Newt threw up.
"Sometimes the pool-pah," Bokonon tells us, "exceeds the power of humans to comment." Bokonon translates pool-pah at one point in The Books of Bokonon as "shit storm" and at another point as "wrath of God."
"What hope can there be for mankind," I thought, "when there are such men as Felix Hoenikker to give such playthings as ice-nine to such short-sighted children as almost all men and women are?"
And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?"
It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.
This is it:
"Nothing."
The old man meant to take only a brief time out in his chair, for he left quite a mess in the kitchen. Part of the disorder was a saucepan filled with solid ice-nine. He no doubt meant to melt it up, to reduce the world's supply of the blue-white stuff to a splinter in a bottle again--after a brief time out.
But, as Bokonon tells us, "Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be."
"What did you people do with the dog?" I asked limply.
"We put him in the oven," Frank told me. "It was the only thing to do."
"History!" writes Bokonon. "Read it and weep!"
A light sea wind ruffled his thinning hair. "I am about to do a very un-ambassadorial thing," he declared. "I am about to tell you what I really feel."
Perhaps Minton had inhaled too much acetone, or perhaps he had an inkling of what was about to happen to everybody but me. At any rate, it was a strikingly Bokononist speech he gave.
"We are gathered here, friends," he said, "to honor lo Hoon-yera Mora-toorz tut Zamoo-cratz-ya, children dead, all dead, all murdered in war. It is customary on days like this to call such lost children men. I am unable to call them men for this simple reason: that in the same war in which lo Hoon-yera Mora-toorz tut Zamoo-cratz-ya died, my own son died.
"My soul insists that I mourn not a man but a child.
"I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays.
"But they are murdered children all the same.
"And I propose to you that if we are to pay our sincere respects to the hundred lost children of San Lorenzo, that we might best spend the day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind.
"Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.
"I do not mean to be ungrateful for the fine, martial show we are about to see--and a thrilling show it really will be . . ."
He looked each of us in the eye, and then he commented very softly, throwing it away, "And hooray say I for thrilling shows."
We had to strain our ears to hear what Minton said next.
"But if today is really in honor of a hundred children murdered in war," he said, "is today a day for a thrilling show?
"The answer is yes, on one condition: that we, the celebrants, are working consciously and tirelessly to reduce the stupidity and viciousness of ourselves and of all mankind."
He unsnapped the catches on his wreath case.
"See what I have brought?" he asked us.
He opened the case and showed us the scarlet lining and the golden wreath. The wreath was made of wire and artificial laurel leaves, and the whole was sprayed with radiator paint.
The wreath was spanned by a cream-colored silk ribbon on which was printed, "PRO PATRIA."
Minton now recited a poem from Edgar Lee Masters' the Spoon River Anthology, a poem that must have been incomprehensible to the San Lorenzans in the audience--and to H. Lowe Crosby and his Hazel, too, for that matter, and to Angela and Frank.
I was the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge.
When I felt the bullet enter my heart
I wished I had staid at home and gone to jail
For stealing the hogs of Curl Trenary,
Instead of running away and joining the army.
Rather a thousand times the county jail
Than to lie under this marble figure with wings,
And this granite pedestal
Bearing the words, "_Pro Patria_."
What do they mean, anyway?
"What do they mean, anyway?" echoed Ambassador Horlick Minton. "They mean, 'For one's country.'" And he threw away another line. "Any country at all," he murmured.
"This wreath I bring is a gift from the people of one country to the people of another. Never mind which countries. Think of people . . .
"And children murdered in war.
"And any country at all.
"Think of peace.
"Think of brotherly love.
"Think of plenty.
"Think of what paradise, this world would be if men were kind and wise.
"As stupid and vicious as men are, this is a lovely day," said Ambassador Horlick Minton. "I, in my own heart and as a representative of the peace-loving people of the United States of America, pity lo Hoon-yera Mora-toorz tut Za-moo-cratz-ya for being dead on this fine day."
And he sailed the wreath off the parapet.
There was a hum in the air. The six planes of the San Lorenzan Air Force were coming, skimming my lukewarm sea. They were going to shoot the effigies of what H. Lowe Crosby had called "practically every enemy that freedom ever had."
The Sixth Book of The Books of Bokonon is devoted to pain, in particular to tortures inflicted by men on men. "If I am ever put to death on the hook," Bokonon warns us, "expect a very human performance."
Then he speaks of the rack and the peddiwinkus and the iron maiden and the veglia and the oubliette.
In any case, there's bound to be much crying.
But the oubliette alone will let you think while dying.
I turned to The Books of Bokonon, still sufficiently unfamiliar with them to believe that they contained spiritual comfort somewhere. I passed quickly over the warning on the title page of The First Book:
"Don't be a fool! Close this book at once! It is nothing but foma!"
Foma, of course, are lies.
And then I read this:
In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.
And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely.
"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.
"Certainly," said man.
"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.
And He went away.
I thought this was trash.
"Of course it's trash!" says Bokonon.
"Today I will be a Bulgarian Minister of Education," Bokonon tells us. "Tomorrow I will be Helen of Troy." His meaning is crystal clear: Each one of us has to be what he or she is. And, down in the oubliette, that was mainly what I thought--with the help of The Books of Bokonon.
Bokonon invited me to sing along with him:
We do, doodley do, doodley do, doodley do,
What we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must;
Muddily do, muddily do, muddily do, muddily do,
Until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust.
I made up a tune to go with that and I whistled it under my breath as I drove the bicycle that drove the fan that gave us air, good old air.
The arch of the palace gate was the only man-made form untouched. Mona and I went to it. Written at its base in white paint was a Bokononist "Calypso." The lettering was neat. It was new. It was proof that someone else had survived the winds.
The "Calypso" was this:
Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end,
And our God will take things back that He to us did lend.
And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,
Why go right ahead and scold Him. He'll just smile and nod.
Mona and I looked at the focus of all those frosted eyes, looked at the center of the bowl. There was a round clearing there, a place in which one orator might have stood.
Mona and I approached the clearing gingerly, avoiding the morbid statuary. We found a boulder in it. And under the boulder was a penciled note which said:
To whom it may concern: These people around you are almost all of the survivors on San Lorenzo of the winds that followed the freezing of the sea. These people made a captive of the spurious holy man named Bokonon.
They brought him here, placed him at their center, and commanded him to tell them exactly what God Almighty was up to and what they should now do. The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possible becase He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did.
The note was signed by Bokonon.
"What a cynic!" I gasped. I looked up from the note and gazed around the death-filled bowl. "Is he here somewhere?"
"I do not see him," said Mona mildly. She wasn't depressed or angry. In fact, she seemed to verge on laughter. "He always said he would never take his own advice, because he knew it was worthless."
"He'd better be here!" I said bitterly. "Think of the gall of the man, advising all these people to kill themselves!"
Now Mona did laugh. I had never heard her laugh. Her laugh was startlingly deep and raw.
"This strikes you as funny?"
She raised her arms lazily. "It's all so simple, that's all. It solves so much for so many, so simply."
And she went strolling up among the petrified thousands, still laughing. She paused about midway up the slope and faced me. She called down to me, "Would you wish any of these alive again, if you could? Answer me quickly.
"Not quick enough with your answer," she called playfully, after half a minute had passed. And, still laughing a little, she touched her finger to the ground, straightened up, and touched the finger to her lips and died.
Did I weep? They say I did. H. Lowe Crosby and his Hazel and little Newton Hoenikker came upon me as I stumbled down the road. They were in Bolivar's one taxicab, which had been spared by the storm. They tell me I was crying. Hazel cried, too, cried for joy that I was alive.
They coaxed me into the cab.
Hazel put her arm around me. "You're with your mom, now. Don't you worry about a thing."
I let my mind go blank. I closed my eyes. It was with deep, idiotic relief that I leaned on that fleshy, humid, barn-yard fool.
"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, puting 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."
"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!
"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 the 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 the 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.
And then I slowed down. And then I stopped. I covered my eyes.
"What's the matter?" asked Newt.
"I saw Bokonon back there."
He was sitting on a rock. He was barefoot. His feet were frosty with ice-nine. His only garment was a white bedspread with blue tufts. The tufts said Casa Mona. He took no note of our arrival. In one hand was a pencil. In the other was paper.
"Bokonon?"
"Yes?"
"May I ask what you're thinking?"
"I am thinking, young man, about the final sentence for The Books of Bokonon. The time for the final sentence has come."
"Any luck?"
He shrugged and handed me a piece of paper.
This is what I read:
If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.