A Medical Opinion on the Effects of a Writers’ Strike 103

None of the guests knew yet that I was to be President. None knew how close to death “Papa” was. Frank gave out the official word that “Papa” was resting comfortably, that “Papa” sent his best wishes to all.

The order of events, as announced by Frank, was that Ambassador Minton would throw his wreath into the sea, in honor of the Hundred Martyrs; and then the airplanes would shoot the targets in the sea; and then he, Frank, would say a few words.

He did not tell the company that, following his speech, there would be a speech by me.

So I was treated as nothing more than a visiting journalist, and I engaged in harmless granfalloonery here and there.

“Hello, Mom,” I said to Hazel Crosby.

“Why, if it isn’t my boy!” Hazel gave me a perfumed hug, and she told everybody, “This boy’s a Hoosier!”

The Castles, father and son, stood separate from the rest of the company. Long unwelcome at “Papa’s” palace, they were curious as to why they had now been invited there.

Young Castle called me “Scoop.” “Good morning, Scoop. What’s new in the word game?”

“I might ask the same of you,” I replied.

“I’m thinking of calling a general strike of all writers until mankind finally comes to its senses. Would you support it?”

“Do writers have a right to strike? That would be like the police or the firemen walking out.”

“Or the college professors.”

“Or the college professors,” I agreed. I shook my head. “No, I don’t think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.”

“I just can’t help thinking what a real shaking up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems…”

“And how proud would you be when people started dying like flies?” I demanded.

“They’d die more like mad dogs, I think — snarling and snapping at each other and biting their own tails.”

I turned to Castle the elder. “Sir, how does a man die when he’s deprived of the consolations of literature?”

“In one of two ways,” he said, “petrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system.”

“Neither one very pleasant, I expect,” I suggested.

“No,” said Castle the elder. “For the love of God, both of you, please keep writing!”

Sulfathiazole 104

My heavenly Mona did not approach me and did not encourage me with languishing glances to come to her side. She made a hostess of herself, introducing Angela and little Newt to San Lorenzans.

As I ponder now the meaning of that girl — recall her indifference to “Papa’s” collapse, to her betrothal to me— I vacillate between lofty and cheap appraisals.

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.

“Tell me,” I appealed to young Philip Castle on the Day of the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy, “have you spoken to your friend and admirer, H. Lowe Crosby, today?”

“He didn’t recognize me with a suit and shoes and necktie on,” young Castle replied. “We’ve already had a nice talk about bicycles. We may have another.”

I found that I was no longer amused by Crosby’s wanting to build bicycles in San Lorenzo. As chief executive of the island I wanted a bicycle factory very much. I developed sudden respect for what H. Lowe Crosby was and could do.

“How do you think the people of San Lorenzo would take to industrialization?” I asked the Castles, father and son.

“The people of San Lorenzo,” the father told me, “are interested in only three things: fishing, fornication, and Bokononism.”

“Don’t you think they could be interested in progress?”

“They’ve seen some of it. There’s only one aspect of progress that really excites them.”

“What’s that?”

“The electric guitar.”

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.”

“How can anybody in his right mind be against science?” asked Crosby.

“I’d be dead now if it wasn’t for penicillin,” said Hazel. “And so would my mother.”

“How old is your mother?” I inquired.

“A hundred and six. Isn’t that wonderful?”

“It certainly is,” I agreed.

“And I’d be a widow, too, if it wasn’t for the medicine they gave my husband that time,” said Hazel. She had to ask her husband the name of the medicine. “Honey, what was the name of that stuff that saved your life that time?”

“Sulfathiazole.”

And I made the mistake of taking an albatross canape from a passing tray.

Pain-killer 105

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. I was compelled to canter down the stone spiral staircase in search of a bathroom. I availed myself of one adjacent to “Papa’s” suite.

When I shuffled out, somewhat relieved, I was met by Dr. Schlichter von Koenigswald, who was bounding from “Papa’s” bedroom. He had a wild look, and he took me by the arms and he cried, “What is it? What was it he had hanging around his neck?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He took it! Whatever was in that cylinder, ‘Papa’ took — and now he’s dead.”

I remembered the cylinder “Papa” had hung around his neck, and I made an obvious guess as to its contents. “Cyanide?”

“Cyanide? Cyanide turns a man to cement in a second?”

“Cement?”

“Marble! Iron! I have never seen such a rigid corpse before. Strike it anywhere and you get a note like a marimba! Come look!” Von Koenigswald hustled me into “Papa’s” bedroom.

In bed, in the golden dinghy, was a hideous thing to see. “Papa” was dead, but his was not a corpse to which one could say, “At rest at last.”

“Papa’s” head was bent back as far as it would go. His weight rested on the crown of his head and the soles of his feet, with the rest of his body forming a bridge whose arch thrust toward the ceiling. He was shaped like an andiron.

That he had died of the contents of the cylinder around his neck was obvious. One hand held the cylinder and the cylinder was uncapped. And the thumb and index finger of the other hand, as though having just released a little pinch of something, were stuck between his teeth.

Dr. von Koenigswald slipped the tholepin of an oarlock from its socket in the gunwale of the gilded dinghy. He tapped “Papa” on his belly with the steel oarlock, and “Papa” really did make a sound like a marimba.

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.

So, again: “Papa” Monzano was the first man in history to die of ice-nine .

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 351