Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut [54]
Billy now moved about the party—outwardly normal. Kilgore Trout was shadowing him, keen to know what Billy had suspected or seen. Most of Trout’s novels, after all, dealt with time warps and extrasensory perception and other unexpected things. Trout believed in things like that, was greedy to have their existence proved.
“You ever put a full-length mirror on the floor, and then have a dog stand on it?” Trout asked Billy.
“No.”
“The dog will look down, and all of a sudden he’ll realize there’s nothing under him. He thinks he’s standing on thin air. He’ll jump a mile.”
“He will?”
“That’s how you looked—as though you all of a sudden realized you were standing on thin air.”
The barbershop quartet sang again. Billy was emotionally racked again. The experience was definitely associated with those four men and not what they sang.
Here is what they sang, while Billy was pulled apart inside:
’Leven cent cotton, forty cent meat,
How in the world can a poor man eat?
Pray for the sunshine, ’cause it will rain.
Things gettin’ worse, drivin’ all insane;
Built a nice bar, painted it brown;
Lightnin’ came along and burnt it down:
No use talkin’, any man’s beat,
With ’leven cent cotton and forty cent meat.
’Leven cent cotton, a car-load of tax,
The load’s too heavy for our poor backs …
And so on.
Billy fled upstairs in his nice white home.
• • •
Trout would have come upstairs with him if Billy hadn’t told him not to. Then Billy went into the upstairs bathroom, which was dark. He closed and locked the door. He left it dark, and gradually became aware that he was not alone. His son was in there.
“Dad—?” his son said in the dark. Robert, the future Green Beret, was seventeen then. Billy liked him, but didn’t know him very well. Billy couldn’t help suspecting that there wasn’t much to know about Robert.
Billy flicked on the light. Robert was sitting on the toilet with his pajama bottoms around his ankles. He was wearing an electric guitar, slung around his neck on a strap. He had just bought the guitar that day. He couldn’t play it yet and, in fact, never learned to play it. It was a nacreous pink.
“Hello, son,” said Billy Pilgrim.
Billy went into his bedroom, even though there were guests to be entertained downstairs. He lay down on his bed, turned on the Magic Fingers. The mattress trembled, drove a dog out from under the bed. The dog was Spot. Good old Spot was still alive in those days. Spot lay down again in a corner.
Billy thought hard about the effect the quartet had had on him, and then found an association with an experience he had had long ago. He did not travel in time to the experience. He remembered it shimmeringly—as follows:
He was down in the meat locker on the night that Dresden was destroyed. There were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high-explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked. The meat locker was a very safe shelter. All that happened down there was an occasional shower of calcimine. The Americans and four of their guards and a few dressed carcasses were down there, and nobody else. The rest of the guards had, before the raid began, gone to the comforts of their own homes in Dresden. They were all being killed with their families.
So it goes.
The girls that Billy had seen naked were all being killed, too, in a much shallower shelter in another part of the stockyards.
So it goes.
A guard would go to the head of the stairs every so often to see what it was like outside, then he would come down and whisper to the other guards. There was a fire-storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn.
It wasn’t safe to come out of the shelter until noon the next day. When the Americans and their guards did come out, the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.