Francis Scott Key was only one of thousands back there. On the off-chance that Key might now be having a look at what had become of the United States of America so far, Eddie focussed his eyes on an American flag which was stuck to the windshield. He said this very quietly: "Still wavin', man."
*
Eddie Key's familiarity with a teeming past made life much more interesting to him than it was to Dwayne, for instance, or to me, or to Kilgore Trout, or to almost any white person in Midland City that day. We had no sense of anybody else using our eyes--or our hands. We didn't even know who our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers were. Eddie Key was afloat in a river of people who were flowing from here to there in time. Dwayne and Trout and I were pebbles at rest.
And Eddie Key, because he knew so much by heart, was able to have deep, nourishing feelings about Dwayne Hoover, for instance, and about Dr. Cyprian Ukwende, too. Dwayne was a man whose family had taken over Bluebird Farm. Ukwende, an Indaro, was a man whose ancestors had kidnapped an ancestor of Key's on the West Coast of Africa, a man named Ojumwa. The Indaros sold him for a musket to British slave traders, who took him on a sailing ship named the "Skylark" to Charleston, South Carolina, where he was auctioned off as a self-propelled, self-repairing farm machine.
And so on.
*
Dwayne Hoover was now hustled aboard Martha through big double doors in her rear, just ahead of the engine compartment. Eddie Key was in the driver's seat, and he watched the action in his rearview mirror. Dwayne was swaddled so tightly in canvas restraining sheets that his reflection looked to Eddie like a bandaged thumb.
Dwayne didn't notice the restraints. He thought he was on the virgin planet promised by the book by Kilgore Trout. Even when he was laid out horizontally by Cyprian Ukwende and Khashdrahr Miasma, he thought he was standing up. The book had told him that he went swimming in cold water on the virgin planet, that he always yelled something surprising when he climbed out of the icy pool. It was a game. The Creator of the Universe would try to guess what Dwayne would yell each day. And Dwayne would fool him totally.
Here is what Dwayne yelled in the ambulance: "Goodbye, Blue Monday!" Then it seemed to him that another day had passed on the virgin planet, and it was time to yell again. "Not a cough in a carload!" he yelled.
*
Kilgore Trout was one of the walking wounded. He was able to climb aboard Martha without assistance, and to choose a place to sit where he would be away from real emergencies. He had jumped Dwayne Hoover from behind when Dwayne dragged Francine Pefko out of Dwayne's showroom and onto the asphalt. Dwayne wanted to give her a beating in public, which his bad chemicals made him think she richly deserved.
Dwayne had already broken her jaw and three ribs in the office. When he trundled her outside, there was a fairsize crowd which had drifted out of the cocktail lounge and the kitchen of the new Holiday Inn. "Best fucking machine in the State," he told the crowd. "Wind her up, and she'll fuck you and say she loves you, and she won't shut up till you give her a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise."
And so on. Trout grabbed him from behind.
Trout's right ring finger somehow slipped into Dwayne's mouth, and Dwayne bit off the topmost joint. Dwayne let go of Francine after that, and she slumped to the asphalt. She was unconscious, and the most seriously injured of all. And Dwayne went cantering over to the concrete trough by the Interstate, and he spat Kilgore Trout's fingertip into Sugar Creek.
*
Kilgore Trout did not choose to lie down in Martha. He settled into a leather bucket seat behind Eddie Key. Key asked him what was the matter with him, and Trout held up his right hand, partly shrouded in a bloody handkerchief, which looked like this:
"A slip of the lip can sink a ship!" yelled Dwayne.
*
"Remember Pearl Harbor!" yelled Dwayne. Most of what he had done during the past three-quarters of an hour had been hideously unjust. But he had spared Wayne Hoobler, at least. Wayne was back among the used cars again, unscathed. He was picking up a bracelet which I had pitched back there for him to find.
As for myself: I kept a respectful distance between myself and all the violence--even though I had created Dwayne and his violence and the city, and the sky above and the Earth below. Even so, I came out of the riot with a broken watch crystal and what turned out later to be a broken toe. Somebody jumped backwards to get out of Dwayne's way. He broke my watch crystal, even though I had created him, and he broke my toe.
*
This isn't the kind of book where people get what is coming to them at the end. Dwayne hurt only one person who deserved to be hurt for being so wicked: That was Don Breedlove. Breedlove was the white gas-conversion unit installer who had raped Patty Keene, the waitress in Dwayne's Burger Chef out on Crestview Avenue, in the parking lot of George Hickman Bannister Memorial Fieldhouse out at the County Fairgrounds after Peanut University beat Innocent Bystander High School in the Regional Class High School Basketball Playoffs.
*
Don Breedlove was in the kitchen of the Inn when Dwayne began his rampage. He was repairing a defective gas oven in there.
He stepped outside for some fresh air, and Dwayne came running up to him. Dwayne had just spit Kilgore Trout's fingertip into Sugar Creek. Don and Dwayne knew each other quite well, since Dwayne had once sold Breedlove a new Pontiac Ventura, which Don said was a lemon. A lemon was an automobile which didn't run right, and which nobody was able to repair.
Dwayne actually lost money on the transaction, making adjustments and replacing parts in an attempt to mollify Breedlove. But Breedlove was inconsolable, and he finally painted this sign in bright yellow on his trunk lid and on both doors:
Here was what was really wrong with the car, incidentally. The child of a neighbor of Breedlove had put maple sugar in the gas tank of the Ventura. Maple sugar was a kind of candy made from the blood of trees.
So Dwayne Hoover now extended his right hand to Breedlove, and Breedlove without thinking anything about it took that hand in his own. They linked up like this:
This was a symbol of friendship between men. The feeling was, too, that a lot of character could be read into the way a man shook hands. Dwayne and Don Breedlove gave each other squeezes which were dry and hard.
So Dwayne held on to Don Breedlove with his right hand, and he smiled as though bygones were bygones. Then he made a cup out of his left hand, and he hit Don on the ear with the open end of the cup. This created terrific air pressure in Don's ear. He fell down because the pain was so awful. Don would never hear anything with that ear, ever again.
*
So Don was in the ambulance, too, now--sitting up like Kilgore Trout. Francine was lying down--unconscious but moaning. Beatrice Keedsler was lying down, although she might have sat up. Her jaw was broken. Bunny Hoover was lying down. His face was unrecognizable, even as a face--anybody's face. He had been given morphine by Cyprian Ukwende.
There were five other victims as well--one white female, two white males, two black males. The three white people had never been in Midland City before. They were on their way together from Erie, Pennsylvania, to the Grand Canyon, which was the deepest crack on the planet. They wanted to look down into the crack, but they never got to do it. Dwayne Hoover assaulted them as they walked from the car toward the lobby of the New Holiday Inn.
The two black males were both kitchen employees of the Inn.
*
Cyprian Ukwende now tried to remove Dwayne Hoover's shoes--but Dwayne's shoes and laces and socks were impregnated with the plastic material, which he had picked up while wading across Sugar Creek.
Ukwende was not mystified by plasticized, unitized shoes and socks. He saw shoes and socks like that every day at the hospital, on the feet of children who had played too close to Sugar Creek. In fact, he had hung a pair of tinsnips on the wall of the hospital's emergency room--for cutting off plasticized, unitized shoes and socks.
He turned to his Bengali assistant,
young Dr. Khashdrahr Miasma. "Get some shears," he said.
Miasma was standing with his back to the door of the ladies' toilet on the emergency vehicle. He had done nothing so far to deal with all the emergencies. Ukwende and police and a team from Civil Defense had done the work so far. Miasma now refused even to find some shears.
Basically, Miasma probably shouldn't have been in the field of medicine at all, or at least not in any area where there was a chance that he might be criticized. He could not tolerate criticism. This was a characteristic beyond his control. Any hint that anything about him was not absolutely splendid automatically turned him into a useless, sulky child who would only say that it wanted to go home.
That was what he said when Ukwende told him a second time to find shears: "I want to go home."
Here is what he had been criticized for, just before the alarm came in about Dwayne's going berserk: He had amputated a black man's foot, whereas the foot could probably have been saved.
And so on.
*
I could go on and on with the intimate details about the various lives of people on the super-ambulance, but what good is more information?
I agree with Kilgore Trout about realistic novels and their accumulations of nit-picking details. In Trout's novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back.
The librarian asks him why he doesn't like it, and he says to her, "I already know about human beings."
And so on.
*
Martha began to move. Kilgore Trout saw a sign he liked a lot. Here is what it said:
And so on.
Dwayne Hoover's awareness returned to Earth momentarily. He spoke of opening a health club in Midland City, with rowing machines and stationary bicycles and whirlpool baths and sunlamps and a swimming pool and so on. He told Cyprian Ukwende that the thing to do with a health club was to open it and then sell it as soon as possible for a profit. "People get all enthusiastic about getting back in shape or losing some pounds," said Dwayne. "They sign up for the program, but then they lose interest in about a year, and they stop coming. That's how people are."
And so on.
Dwayne wasn't going to open any health club. He wasn't going to open anything ever again. The people he had injured so unjustly would sue him so vengefully that he would be rendered destitute. He would become one more withered balloon of an old man on Midland City's Skid Row, which was the neighborhood of the once fashionable Fairchild Hotel. He would be by no means the only drifter of whom it could be truthfully said, "See him? Can you believe it? He doesn't have a doodley-squat now, but he used to be fabulously well-to-do."
And so on.
Kilgore Trout now peeled strips and patches of plastic from his burning shins and feet in the ambulance. He had to use his uninjured left hand.
EPILOGUE
THE EMERGENCY ROOM of the hospital was in the basement. After Kilgore Trout had the stump of his ring finger disinfected and trimmed and bandaged, he was told to go upstairs to the finance office. There were certain forms he had to fill out, since he was from outside Midland County, had no health insurance, and was destitute. He had no checkbook. He had no cash.
He got lost in the basement for a little while, as a lot of people did. He found the double doors to the morgue, as a lot of people did. He automatically mooned about his own mortality, as a lot of people did. He found an x-ray room, which wasn't in use. It made him wonder automatically if anything bad was growing inside himself. Other people had wondered exactly the same thing when they passed that room.
Trout felt nothing now that millions of other people wouldn't have felt--automatically.
And Trout found stairs, but they were the wrong stairs. They led him not to the lobby and the finance office and the gift shop and all that, but into a matrix of rooms where persons were recovering or failing to recover from injuries of all kinds. Many of the people there had been flung to the earth by the force of gravity, which never relaxed for a second.
Trout passed a very expensive private room now, and there was a young black man in there, with a white telephone and a color television set and boxes of candy and bouquets of flowers all around. He was Elgin Washington, a pimp who operated out of the old Holiday Inn. He was only twenty-six years old, but he was fabulously well-to-do.
Visiting hours had ended, so all his female sex slaves had departed. But they had left clouds of perfume behind. Trout gagged as he passed the door. It was an automatic reaction to the fundamentally unfriendly cloud. Elgin Washington had just sniffed cocaine into his sinus passages, which amplified tremendously the telepathic messages he sent and received. He felt one hundred times bigger than life, because the messages were so loud and exciting. It was their noise that thrilled him. He didn't care what they said.
And, in the midst of the uproar, Elgin Washington said something wheedlingly to Trout. "Hey man, hey man, hey man," he wheedled. He had had his foot amputated earlier in the day by Khashdrahr Miasma, but he had forgotten that. "Hey man, hey man," he coaxed. He wanted nothing particular from Trout. Some part of his mind was idly exercising his skill at making strangers come to him. He was a fisherman for men's souls. "Hey man--" he said. He showed a gold tooth. He winked an eye.
Trout came to the foot of the black man's bed. This wasn't compassion on his part. He was being machinery again. Trout was, like so many Earthlings, a fully automatic boob when a pathological personality like Elgin Washington told him what to want, what to do. Both men, incidentally, were descendants of the Emperor Charlemagne. Anybody with any European blood in him was a descendant of the Emperor Charlemagne.
Elgin Washington perceived that he had caught yet another human being without really meaning to. It was not in his nature to let one go without making him feel in some way diminished, in some way a fool. Sometimes he actually killed a man in order to diminish him, but he was gentle with Trout. He closed his eyes as though thinking hard, then he earnestly said, "I think I may be dying."
"I'll get a nurse!" said Trout. Any human being would have said exactly the same thing.
"No, no," said Elgin Washington, waving his hands in dreamy protest. "I'm dying slow. It's gradual."
"I see," said Trout.
"You got to do me a favor," said Washington. He had no idea what favor to ask. It would come to him. Ideas for favors always came.
"What favor?" said Trout uneasily. He stiffened at the mention of an unspecified favor. He was that kind of a machine. Washington knew he would stiffen. Every human being was that kind of a machine.
"I want you to listen to me while I whistle the song of the Nightingale," he said. He commanded Trout to be silent by giving him the evil eye. "What adds peculiar beauty to the call of the Nightingale, much beloved by poets," he said, "is the fact that it will only sing by moonlight." Then he did what almost every black person in Midland City would do: He imitated a Nightingale.
*
The Midland City Festival of the Arts was postponed because of madness. Fred T. Barry, its chairman, came to the hospital in his limousine, dressed like a Chinaman, to offer his sympathy to Beatrice Keedsler and Kilgore Trout. Trout could not be found anywhere. Beatrice Keedsler had been put to sleep with morphine.
Kilgore Trout assumed that the Arts Festival would still take place that night. He had no money for any form of transportation, so he set out on foot. He began the five mile walk down Fairchild Boulevard--toward a tiny amber dot at the other end. The dot was the Midland City Center for the Arts. He would make it grow by walking toward it. When his walking had made it big enough, it would swallow him up. There would be food inside.
*
I was waiting to intercept him, about six blocks away. I sat in a Plymouth Duster I had rented from Avis with my Diners' Club card, I had a paper tube in my mouth. It was stuffed with leaves. I set it o
n fire. It was a soigne thing to do.
My penis was three inches long and five inches in diameter. Its diameter was a world's record as far as I knew. It slumbered now in my Jockey Shorts. And I got out of the car to stretch my legs, which was another soigne thing to do. I was among factories and warehouses. The streetlights were widely-spaced and feeble. Parking lots were vacant, except for night watchmen's cars which were here and there. There was no traffic on Fairchild Boulevard, which had once been the aorta of the town. The life had all been drained out of it by the Interstate and by the Robert F. Kennedy Inner Belt Expressway, which was built on the old right-of-way of the Monon Railroad. The Monon was defunct.
*
Defunct.
*
Nobody slept in that part of town. Nobody lurked there. It was a system of forts at night, with high fences and alarms, and with prowling dogs. They were killing machines.
When I got out of my Plymouth Duster, I feared nothing. That was foolish of me. A writer off-guard, since the materials with which he works are so dangerous, can expect agony as quick as a thunderclap.
I was about to be attacked by a Doberman pinscher. He was a leading character in an earlier version of this book.
*
Listen: That Doberman's name was Kazak. He patrolled the supply yard of the Maritimo Brothers Construction Company at night. Kazak's trainers, the people who explained to him what sort of a planet he was on and what sort of an animal he was, taught him that the Creator of the Universe wanted him to kill anything he could catch, and to eat it, too.
In an earlier version of this book, I had Benjamin Davis, the black husband of Lottie Davis, Dwayne Hoover's maid, take care of Kazak. He threw raw meat down into the pit where Kazak lived in the daytime. He dragged Kazak into the pit at sunrise. He screamed at him and threw tennis balls at him at sundown. Then he turned him loose.