Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut [9]
He was doing nothing less now, he thought, than prescribing corrective lenses for Earthling souls. So many of those souls were lost and wretched, Billy believed, because they could not see as well as his little green friends on Tralfamadore.
• • •
“Don’t lie to me, Father,” said Barbara. “I know perfectly well you heard me when I called.” This was a fairly pretty girl, except that she had legs like an Edwardian grand piano. Now she raised hell with him about the letter in the paper. She said he was making a laughing stock of himself and everybody associated with him.
“Father, Father, Father—” said Barbara, “what are we going to do with you? Are you going to force us to put you where your mother is?” Billy’s mother was still alive. She was in bed in an old people’s home called Pine Knoll on the edge of Ilium.
“What is it about my letter that makes you so mad?” Billy wanted to know.
“It’s all just crazy. None of it’s true!”
“It’s all true.” Billy’s anger was not going to rise with hers. He never got mad at anything. He was wonderful that way.
“There is no such planet as Tralfamadore.”
“It can’t be detected from Earth, if that’s what you mean,” said Billy. “Earth can’t be detected from Tralfamadore, as far as that goes. They’re both very small. They’re very far apart.”
“Where did you get a crazy name like ‘Tralfamadore?’”
“That’s what the creatures who live there call it.”
“Oh God,” said Barbara, and she turned her back on him. She celebrated frustration by clapping her hands. “May I ask you a simple question?”
“Of course.”
“Why is it you never mentioned any of this before the airplane crash?”
“I didn’t think the time was ripe.”
And so on. Billy says that he first came unstuck in time in 1944, long before his trip to Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians didn’t have anything to do with his coming unstuck. They were simply able to give him insights into what was really going on.
Billy first came unstuck while World War Two was in progress. Billy was a chaplain’s assistant in the war. A chaplain’s assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the American Army. Billy was no exception. He was powerless to harm the enemy or to help his friends. In fact, he had no friends. He was a valet to a preacher, expected no promotions or medals, bore no arms, and had a meek faith in a loving Jesus which most soldiers found putrid.
While on maneuvers in South Carolina, Billy played hymns he knew from childhood, played them on a little black organ which was waterproof. It had thirty-nine keys and two stops—vox humana and vox celeste. Billy also had charge of a portable altar, an olive-drab attaché case with telescoping legs. It was lined with crimson plush, and nestled in that passionate plush were an anodized aluminum cross and a Bible.
The altar and the organ were made by a vacuum-cleaner company in Camden, New Jersey—and said so.
One time on maneuvers Billy was playing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” with music by Johann Sebastian Bach and words by Martin Luther. It was Sunday morning. Billy and his chaplain had gathered a congregation of about fifty soldiers on a Carolina hillside. An umpire appeared. There were umpires everywhere, men who said who was winning or losing the theoretical battle, who was alive and who was dead.
The umpire had comical news. The congregation had been theoretically spotted from the air by a theoretical enemy. They were all theoretically dead now. The theoretical corpses laughed and ate a hearty noontime meal.
Remembering this incident years later, Billy was struck by what a Tralfamadorian adventure with death that had been, to be dead and to eat at the same time.