Aspirin and Boko-maru 77

“Tell me, Doctor,” I said to Julian Castle, “how is ‘Papa’ Monzano?”

“How would I know?”

“I thought you’d probably been treating him.”

“We don’t speak…” Castle smiled. “He doesn’t speak to me, that is. The last thing he said to me, which was about three years ago, was that the only thing that kept me off the hook was my American citizenship.”

“What have you done to offend him? You come down here and with your own money found a free hospital for his people…”

“ ‘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.”

Ring of Steel 78

“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!”

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 529