Breakfast of Champions

  Ecstasy bloomed on the barbaric face of Rabo Karabekian. "Citizens of Midland City, I salute you," he said. "You have given a home to a masterpiece!"

  Dwayne Hoover, incidentally, wasn't taking any of this in. He was still hypnotized, turned inward. He was thinking about moving fingers writing and moving on, and so forth. He had bats in his bell tower. He was off his rocker. He wasn't playing with a full deck of cards.

  20

  WHILE MY LIFE was being renewed by the words of Rabo Karabekian, Kilgore Trout found himself standing on the shoulder of the Interstate, gazing across Sugar Creek in its concrete trough at the new Holiday Inn. There were no bridges across the creek. He would have to wade.

  So he sat down on a guardrail, removed his shoes and socks, rolled his pantlegs to his knees. His bared shins were rococo with varicose veins and scars. So were the shins of my father when he was an old, old man.

  Kilgore Trout had my father's shins. They were a present from me. I gave him my father's feet, too, which were long and narrow and sensitive. They were azure. They were artistic feet.

  *

  Trout lowered his artistic feet into the concrete trough containing Sugar Creek. They were coated at once with a clear plastic substance from the surface of the creek. When, in some surprise, Trout lifted one coated foot from the water, the plastic substance dried in air instantly, sheathed his foot in a thin, skin-tight bootie resembling mother-of-pearl. He repeated the process with his other foot.

  The substance was coming from the Barrytron plant. The company was manufacturing a new anti-personnel bomb for the Air Force. The bomb scattered plastic pellets instead of steel pellets, because the plastic pellets were cheaper. They were also impossible to locate in the bodies of wounded enemies by means of x-ray machines.

  Barrytron had no idea it was dumping this waste into Sugar Creek. They had hired the Maritimo Brothers Construction Company, which was gangster-controlled, to build a system which would get rid of the waste. They knew the company was gangster-controlled. Everybody knew that. But the Maritimo Brothers were usually the best builders in town. They had built Dwayne Hoover's house, for instance, which was a solid house.

  But every so often they would do something amazingly criminal. The Barrytron disposal system was a case in point. It was expensive, and it appeared to be complicated and busy. Actually, though, it was old junk hooked up every which way, concealing a straight run of stolen sewer pipe running directly from Barrytron to Sugar Creek.

  Barrytron would be absolutely sick when it learned what a polluter it had become. Throughout its history, it had attempted to be a perfect model of corporate good citizenship, no matter what it cost.

  *

  Trout now crossed Sugar Creek on my father's legs and feet, and those appendages became more nacreous with every wading stride. He carried his parcels and his shoes and socks on his head, although the water scarcely reached his kneecaps.

  He knew how ridiculous he looked. He expected to be received abominably, dreamed of embarrassing the Festival to death. He had come all this distance for an orgy of masochism. He wanted to be treated like a cockroach.

  *

  His situation, insofar as he was a machine, was complex, tragic, and laughable. But the sacred part of him, his awareness, remained an unwavering band of light.

  And this book is being written by a meat machine in cooperation with a machine made of metal and plastic. The plastic, incidentally, is a close relative of the gunk in Sugar Creek. And at the core of the writing meat machine is something sacred, which is an unwavering band of light.

  At the core of each person who reads this book is a band of unwavering light.

  My doorbell has just rung in my New York apartment. And I know what I will find when I open my front door: an unwavering band of light.

  God bless Rabo Karabekian!

  *

  Listen: Kilgore Trout climbed out of the trough and onto the asphalt desert which was the parking lot. It was his plan to enter the lobby of the Inn on wet bare feet, to leave footprints on the carpet--like this:

  It was Trout's fantasy that somebody would be outraged by the footprints. This would give him the opportunity to reply grandly, "What is it that offends you so? I am simply using man's first printing press. You are reading a bold and universal headline which says, 'I am here, I am here, I am here.'"

  *

  But Trout was no walking printing press. His feet left no marks on the carpet, because they were sheathed in plastic and the plastic was dry. Here was the structure of the plastic molecule:

  The molecule went on and on and on, repeating itself forever to form a sheet both tough and poreless.

  This molecule was the monster Dwayne's twin stepbrothers, Lyle and Kyle, had attacked with their automatic shotguns. This was the same stuff which was fucking up Sacred Miracle Cave.

  *

  The man who told me how to diagram a segment of a molecule of plastic was Professor Walter H. Stockmayer of Dartmouth College. He is a distinguished physical chemist, and an amusing and useful friend of mine. I did not make him up. I would like to be Professor Walter H. Stockmayer. He is a brilliant pianist. He skis like a dream.

  And when he sketched a plausible molecule, he indicated points where it would go on and on just as I have indicated them--with an abbreviation which means sameness without end.

  The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be that same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one:

  *

  And it is in order to acknowledge the continuity of this polymer that I begin so many sentences with "And" and "So," and end so many paragraphs with "... and so on."

  And so on.

  "It's all like an ocean!" cried Dostoevski. I say it's all like cellophane.

  *

  So Trout entered the lobby as an inkless printing press, but he was still the most grotesque human being who had ever come in there.

  All around him were what other people called mirrors, which he called leaks. The entire wall which separated the lobby from the cocktail lounge was a leak ten feet high and thirty-feet long. There was another leak on the cigarette machine and yet another on the candy machine. And when Trout looked through them to see what was going on in the other universe, he saw a red-eyed, filthy old creature who was barefoot, who had his pants rolled up to his knees.

  As it happened, the only other person in the lobby at the time was the beautiful young desk clerk, Milo Maritimo. Milo's clothing and skin and eyes were all the colors that olives can be. He was a graduate of the Cornell Hotel School. He was the homosexual grandson of Guillermo "Little Willie" Maritimo, a bodyguard of the notorious Chicago gangster, Al Capone.

  Trout presented himself to this harmless man, stood before his desk with his bare feet far apart and his arms outspread. "The Abominable Snowman has arrived," he said to Milo. "If I'm not as clean as most abominable snowmen are, it is because I was kidnapped as a child from the slopes of Mount Everest, and taken as a slave to a bordello in Rio de Janeiro, where I have been cleaning the unspeakably filthy toilets for the past fifty years. A visitor to our whipping room there screamed in a transport of agony and ecstasy that there was to be an arts festival in Midland City. I escaped down a rope of sheets taken from a reeking hamper. I have come to Midland City to have myself acknowledged, before I die, as the great artist I believe myself to be."

  Milo Maritimo greeted Trout with luminous adoration. "Mr. Trout," he said in rapture, "I'd know you anywhere. Welcome to Midland City. We need you so!"

  "How do you know who I am?" said Kilgore Trout. Nobody had ever known who he was before.

  "You had to be you," said Milo.

  Trout was deflated--neutralized. He dropped his arms, became child-like now. "Nobody ever knew who I was before," he said.

  "I know," said Milo. "We have discovered you, and we hope you will discover us. No longer will Midland
City be known merely as the home of Mary Alice Miller, the Women's Two Hundred Meter Breast Stroke Champion of the World. It will also be the city which first acknowledged the greatness of Kilgore Trout."

  Trout simply walked away from the desk and sat down on a brocaded Spanish-style settee. The entire lobby, except for the vending machines, was done in Spanish style.

  Milo now used a line from a television show which had been popular a few years back. The show wasn't on the air anymore, but most people still remembered the line. Much of the conversation in the country consisted of lines from television shows, both present and past. The show Milo's line was from consisted of taking some old person, usually fairly famous, into what looked like an ordinary room, only it was actually a stage, with an audience out front and television cameras hidden all around. There were also people who had known the person in the older days hidden around. They would come out and tell anecdotes about the person later on.

  Milo now said what the master of ceremonies would have said to Trout, if Trout had been on the show and the curtain was going up: "Kilgore Trout! This is your life!"

  *

  Only there wasn't any audience or curtain or any of that. And the truth was that Milo Maritimo was the only person in Midland City who knew anything about Kilgore Trout. It was wishful thinking on his part that the upper crust of Midland City was about to be as ga-ga as he was about the works of Kilgore Trout.

  "We are so ready for a Renaissance, Mr. Trout! You will be our Leonardo!"

  "How could you possibly have heard of me?" said Trout dazedly.

  "In getting ready for the Midland City Renaissance," said Milo, "I made it my business to read everything I could by and about every artist who was on his way here."

  "There isn't anything by me or about me anywhere," protested Trout.

  Milo came from behind his desk. He brought with him what appeared to be a lopsided old softball, swaddled in many different sorts of tape. "When I couldn't find out anything about you," he said, "I wrote to Eliot Rosewater, the man who said we had to bring you here. He has a private collection of forty-one of your novels and sixty-three of your short stories, Mr. Trout. He let me read them all." He held out the seeming baseball, which was actually a book from Rosewater's collection. Rosewater used his science-fiction library hard. "This is the only book I haven't finished, and I'll finish it before the sun comes up tomorrow," said Milo.

  *

  The novel in question, incidentally, was The Smart Bunny. The leading character was a rabbit who lived like all the other wild rabbits, but who was as intelligent as Albert Einstein or William Shakespeare. It was a female rabbit. She was the only female leading character in any novel or story by Kilgore Trout.

  She led a normal female rabbit's life, despite her ballooning intellect. She concluded that her mind was useless, that it was a sort of tumor, that it had no usefulness within the rabbit scheme of things.

  So she went hippity-hop, hippity-hop toward the city, to have the tumor removed. But a hunter named Dudley Farrow shot and killed her before she got there. Farrow skinned her and took out her guts, but then he and his wife Grace decided that they had better not eat her because of her unusually large head. They thought what she had thought when she was alive--that she must be diseased.

  And so on.

  *

  Kilgore Trout had to change into his only other garments, his high school tuxedo and his new evening shirt and all, right away. The lower parts of his rolled-up trousers had become impregnated with the plastic substance from the creek, so he couldn't roll them down again. They were as stiff as flanges on sewer pipes.

  So Milo Maritimo showed him to his suite, which was two ordinary Holiday Inn rooms with a door between them open. Trout and every distinguished visitor had a suite, with two color television sets, two tile baths, four double beds equipped with Magic Fingers. Magic Fingers were electric vibrators attached to the mattress springs of a bed. If a guest put a quarter into a little box on his bedside table, the Magic Fingers would jiggle his bed.

  There were enough flowers in Trout's room for a Catholic gangster's funeral. They were from Fred T. Barry, the Chairman of the Arts Festival, and from the Midland City Association of Women's Clubs, and from the Chamber of Commerce, and on and on.

  Trout read a few of the cards on the flowers, and he commented, "The town certainly seems to be getting behind the arts in a great big way."

  Milo closed his olive eyes tight, wincing with a tangy agony. "It's time. Oh God, Mr. Trout, we were starving for so long, without even knowing what we were hungering for," he said. This young man was not only a descendant of master criminals, he was a close relative of felons operating in Midland City at the present time. The partners in the Maritimo Brothers Construction Company, for instance, were his uncles. Gino Maritimo, Milo's first cousin once removed, was the dope king of the city.

  *

  "Oh, Mr. Trout," nice Milo went on, there in Trout's suite, "teach us to sing and dance and laugh and cry. We've tried to survive so long on money and sex and envy and real estate and football and basketball and automobiles and television and alcohol--on sawdust and broken glass!"

  "Open your eyes!" said Trout bitterly. "Do I look like a dancer, a singer, a man of joy?" He was wearing his tuxedo now. It was a size too large for him. He had lost much weight since high school. His pockets were crammed with mothballs. They bulged like saddlebags.

  "Open your eyes!" said Trout. "Would a man nourished by beauty look like this? You have nothing but desolation and desperation here, you say? I bring you more of the same!"

  "My eyes are open," said Milo warmly, "and I see exactly what I expect to see. I see a man who is terribly wounded--because he has dared to pass through the fires of truth to the other side, which we have never seen. And then he has come back again--to tell us about the other side."

  *

  And I sat there in the new Holiday Inn, and made it disappear, then appear again, then disappear, then appear again. Actually, there was nothing but a big open field there. A farmer had put it into rye.

  It was high time, I thought, for Trout to meet Dwayne Hoover, for Dwayne to run amok.

  I knew how this book would end. Dwayne would hurt a lot of people. He would bite off one joint of the right index finger of Kilgore Trout.

  And then Trout, with his wound dressed, would walk out into the unfamiliar city. He would meet his Creator, who would explain everything.

  21

  KILGORE TROUT entered the cocktail lounge. His feet were fiery hot. They were encased not only in shoes and socks, but in clear plastic, too. They could not sweat, they could not breathe.

  Rabo Karabekian and Beatrice Keedsler did not see him come in. They were surrounded by new affectionate friends at the piano bar. Karabekian's speech had been splendidly received. Everybody agreed now that Midland City had one of the greatest paintings in the world.

  "All you had to do was explain," said Bonnie MacMahon. "I understand now."

  "I didn't think there was anything to explain," said Carlo Maritino, the builder, wonderingly. "But there was, by God."

  Abe Cohen, the jeweler, said to Karabekian, "If artists would explain more, people would like art more. You realize that?"

  And so on.

  Trout was feeling spooky. He thought maybe a lot of people were going to greet him as effusively as Milo Maritimo had done, and he had had no experience with celebrations like that. But nobody got in his way. His old friend Anonymity was by his side again, and the two of them chose a table near Dwayne Hoover and me. All he could see of me was the reflection of candle flames in my mirrored glasses, in my leaks.

  Dwayne Hoover was still mentally absent from activities in the cocktail lounge. He sat like a lump of nose putty, staring at something long ago and far away.

  Dwayne moved his lips as Trout sat down. He was saying this soundlessly, and it had nothing to do with Trout or me: "Goodbye, Blue Monday."

  *

  Trout had a fat manila en
velope with him. Milo Maritimo had given it to him. It contained a program for the Festival of the Arts, a letter of welcome to Trout from Fred T. Barry, the Chairman of the Festival, a timetable of events during the coming week--and some other things.

  Trout also carried a copy of his novel Now It Can Be Told. This was the wide-open beaver book which Dwayne Hoover would soon take so seriously.

  So there the three of us were. Dwayne and Trout and I could have been included in an equilateral triangle about twelve feet on a side.

  As three unwavering bands of light, we were simple and separate and beautiful. As machines, we were flabby bags of ancient plumbing and wiring, of rusty hinges and feeble springs. And our interrelationships were Byzantine.

  After all, I had created both Dwayne and Trout, and now Trout was about to drive Dwayne into full-blown insanity, and Dwayne would soon bite off the tip of Trout's finger.

  *

  Wayne Hoobler was watching us through a peephole in the kitchen. There was a tap on his shoulder. The man who had fed him now told him to leave.

  So he wandered outdoors, and he found himself among Dwayne's used cars again. He resumed his conversation with the traffic on the Interstate.

  *

  The bartender in the cocktail lounge now flicked on the ultraviolet lights in the ceiling. Bonnie MacMahon's uniform, since it was impregnated with fluorescent materials, lit up like an electric sign.

  So did the bartender's jacket and the African masks on the walls.

  So did Dwayne Hoover's shirt, and the shirts of several other men. The reason was this: Those shirts had been laundered in washday products which contained fluorescent materials. The idea was to make clothes look brighter in sunlight by making them actually fluorescent.

  When the same clothes were viewed in a dark room under ultraviolet light, however, they became ridiculously bright.

  Bunny Hoover's teeth also lit up, since he used a toothpaste containing fluorescent materials, which was supposed to make his smile look brighter in daylight. He grinned now, and he appeared to have a mouthful of little Christmas tree lights.

  But the brightest new light in the room by far was the bosom of Kilgore Trout's new evening shirt. Its brilliance twinkled and had depth. It might have been the top of a slumping, open sack of radioactive diamonds.