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Why Frank Couldn’t Be President 88

 

“Me? President?” I gasped.

“Who else is there?”

“Nuts!”

“Don’t say no until you’ve really thought about it.” Frank watched me anxiously.

“No!”

“You haven’t really thought about it.”

“Enough to know it’s crazy.”

Frank made his fingers into gears again. “We’d work together . I’d be backing you up all the time.”

“Good. So, if I got plugged from the front you’d get it, too.”

“Plugged?”

“Shot! Assassinated!”

Frank was mystified. “Why would anybody shoot you?”

“So he could get to be President.”

Frank shook his head. “Nobody in San Lorenzo wants to be President,” he promised me. “It’s against their religion.”

“It’s against your religion, too? I thought you were going to be the next President.”

“I…” he said, and found it hard to go on. He looked haunted.

“You what?” I asked.

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.”

“I know I’ve got limitations,” Frank continued. “They’re the same limitations my father had.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve got a lot of very good ideas, just the way my father did,” Frank told me and the waterfall, “but he was no good at facing the public, and neither am I.”

 

Duffle 89

 

“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.

I laughed.

“Something’s funny?”

“Pay no attention when I laugh,” I begged him. “I’m a notorious pervert in that respect.”

“Are you laughing at me?” I shook my head.

“No.”

“Word of honor?”

“Word of honor.”

“People used to make fun of me all the time.”

“You must have imagined that.”

“They used to yell things at me. I didn’t imagine that .”

“People are unkind sometimes without meaning to be,” I suggested. I wouldn’t have given him my word of honor on that.

“You know what they used to yell at me?”

“No.”

“They used to yell at me, ‘Hey, X-9, where you going?’ ”

“That doesn’t seem too bad.”

“That’s what they used to call me,” said Frank in sulky reminiscence, “ ‘Secret Agent X-9.’ ”

I didn’t tell him I knew that already.

“ ‘Where are you going, X-9?’ ” Frank echoed again.

I imagined what the taunters had been like, imagined where Fate had eventually goosed and chivvied them to. The wits who had yelled at Frank were surely nicely settled in deathlike jobs at General Forge and Foundry, at Ilium Power and Light, at the Telephone Company..

And here, by God, was Secret Agent X-9, a Major General, offering to make me king… in a cave that was curtained by a tropical waterfall.



“They really would have been surprised if I’d stopped and told them where I was going.”

“You mean you had some premonition you’d end up here?” It was a Bokononist question.

“I was going to Jack’s Hobby Shop,” he said, with no sense of anticlimax.

“Oh.”

“They all knew I was going there, but they didn’t know what really went on there. They would have been really surprised — especially the girls — if they’d found out what really went on. The girls didn’t think I knew anything about girls.”

“What really went on?”

“I was screwing Jack’s wife every day. That’s how come I fell asleep all the time in high school. That’s how come I never achieved my full potential.”

He roused himself from this sordid recollection. “Come on. Be president of San Lorenzo. You’d be real good at it, with your personality. Please?”

 

Only One Catch 90

 

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.

Outwardly, I was still guarded, suspicious. “There must be a catch,” I hedged.

“There isn’t.”

“There’ll be an election?”

“There never has been. We’ll just announce who the new President is.”

“And nobody will object?”

“Nobody objects to anything. They aren’t interested. They don’t care.”

“There has to be a catch!”

“There’s kind of one,” Frank admitted.

“I knew it!” I began to shrink from my vin-dit . “What is it? What’s the catch?”

“Well, it isn’t really a catch, because you don’t have to do it, if you don’t want to. It would be a good idea, though.”

“Let’s hear this great idea.”

“Well, if you’re going to be President, I think you really ought to marry Mona. But you don’t have to, if you don’t want to. You’re the boss.”

“She would have me?”

“If she’d have me, she’d have you. All you have to do is ask her.”

“Why should she say yes?”

“It’s predicted in The Books of Bokonon that she’ll marry the next President of San Lorenzo,” said Frank.

 

Mona 91

 

Frank brought Mona to her father’s cave and left us alone. We had difficulty in speaking at first. I was shy. Her gown was diaphanous. Her gown was azure. It was a simple gown, caught lightly at the waist by a gossamer thread. All else was shaped by Mona herself. Her breasts were like pomegranates or what you will, but like nothing so much as a young woman’s breasts.

Her feet were all but bare. Her toenails were exquisitely manicured. Her scanty sandals were gold.

“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.

“My God, you have no idea how many mistakes I’ve already made. You’re looking at the world’s champion mistake-maker,” I blurted — and so on. “Do you have any idea what Frank just said to me?”

“About me?

“About everything, but especially about you.”

“He told you that you could have me, if you wanted.”

“Yes.”

“That’s true.”

“I — I—I…”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know what to say next.”

Boko-maru would help,” she suggested.

“What?”

“Take off your shoes,” she commanded. And she removed her sandals with the utmost grace.

I am a man of the world, having had, by a reckoning I once made, more than fifty-three women. I can say that I have seen women undress themselves in every way that it can be done. I have watched the curtains part in every variation of the final act.

And yet, the one woman who made me groan involuntarily did no more than remove her sandals.

I tried to untie my shoes. No bridegroom ever did worse. I got one shoe off, but knotted the other one tight. I tore a thumbnail on the knot; finally ripped off the shoe without untying it.

Then off came my socks.

Mona was already sitting on the floor, her legs extended, her round arms thrust behind her for support, her head tilted back, her eyes closed.

It was up to me now to complete my first — my first — my first, Great God…

Boko-maru .

 


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 429


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