Benjamin Davis was first trumpet with the Midland City Symphony Orchestra, but he got no pay for that, so he needed a real job. He wore a thick gown made of war-surplus mattresses and chicken wire, so Kazak could not kill him. Kazak tried and tried. There were chunks of mattress and swatches of chicken wire all over the yard.
And Kazak did his best to kill anybody who came too close to the fence which enclosed his planet. He leaped at people as though the fence weren't there. The fence bellied out toward the sidewalk everywhere. It looked as though somebody had been shooting cannonballs at it from inside.
I should have noticed the queer shape of the fence when I got out of my automobile, when I did the soigne thing of lighting a cigarette. I should have known that a character as ferocious as Kazak was not easily cut out of a novel.
Kazak was crouching behind a pile of bronze pipe which the Maritimo Brothers had bought cheap from a hijacker earlier that day. Kazak meant to kill and eat me.
*
I turned my back to the fence, took a deep puff of my cigarette. Pall Malls would kill me by and by. And I mooned philosophically at the murky battlements of the old Keedsler Mansion, on the other side of Fairchild Boulevard.
Beatrice Keedsler had been raised in there. The most famous murders in the city's history had been committed there. Will Fairchild, the war hero, and the maternal uncle of Beatrice Keedsler, appeared one summer night in 1926 with a Springfield rifle. He shot and killed five relatives, three servants, two policemen, and all the animals in the Keedslers' private zoo. Then he shot himself through his heart.
When an autopsy was performed on him, a tumor the size of a piece of birdshot was found in his brain. This was what caused the murders.
*
After the Keedslers lost the mansion at the start of the Great Depression, Fred T. Barry and his parents moved in. The old place was filled with the sounds of British birds. It was silent property of the city now, and there was talk of making it into a museum where children could learn the history of Midland City--as told by arrowheads and stuffed animals and white men's early artifacts.
Fred T. Barry had offered to donate half a million dollars to the proposed museum, on one condition: that the first Robo-Magic and the early posters which advertised it be put on display.
And he wanted the exhibit to show, too, how machines evolved just as animals did, but with much greater speed.
*
I gazed at the Keedsler mansion, never dreaming that a volcanic dog was about to erupt behind me. Kilgore Trout came nearer. I was almost indifferent to his approach, although we had momentous things to say to one another about my having created him.
I thought instead of my paternal grandfather, who had been the first licensed architect in Indiana. He had designed some dream houses for Hoosier millionaires. They were mortuaries and guitar schools and cellar holes and parking lots now. I thought of my mother, who drove me around Indianapolis one time during the Great Depression, to impress me with how rich and powerful my maternal grandfather had been. She showed me where his brewery had been, where some of his dream houses had been. Every one of the monuments was a cellar hole.
Kilgore Trout was only half a block from his Creator now, and slowing down. I worried him.
I turned toward him, so that my sinus cavities, where all telepathic messages were sent and received, were lined up symmetrically with his. I told him this over and over telepathically: "I have good news for you."
Kazak sprung.
*
I saw Kazak out of the corner of my right eye. His eyes were pinwheels. His teeth were white daggers. His slobber was cyanide. His blood was nitroglycerine.
He was floating toward me like a zeppelin, hanging lazily in air.
My eyes told my mind about him.
My mind sent a message to my hypothalamus, told it to release the hormone CRF into the short vessels connecting my hypothalamus and my pituitary gland.
The CRF inspired my pituitary gland to dump the hormone ACTH into my bloodstream. My pituitary had been making and storing ACTH for just such an occasion. And nearer and nearer the zeppelin came.
And some of the ACTH in my bloodstream reached the outer shell of my adrenal gland, which had been making and storing glucocorticoids for emergencies. My adrenal gland added the glucocorticoids to my bloodstream. They went all over my body, changing glycogen into glucose. Glucose was muscle food. It would help me fight like a wildcat or run like a deer.
And nearer and nearer the zeppelin came.
My adrenal gland gave me a shot of adrenaline, too. I turned purple as my blood pressure skyrocketed. The adrenaline made my heart go like a burglar alarm. It also stood my hair on end. It also caused coagulants to pour into my bloodstream, so, in case I was wounded, my vital juices wouldn't drain away.
Everything my body had done so far fell within normal operating procedures for a human machine. But my body took one defensive measure which I am told was without precedent in medical history. It may have happened because some wire short-circuited or some gasket blew. At any rate, I also retracted my testicles into my abdominal cavity, pulled them into my fuselage like the landing gear of an airplane. And now they tell me that only surgery will bring them down again.
Be that as it may, Kilgore Trout watched me from half a block away, not knowing who I was, not knowing about Kazak and what my body had done about Kazak so far.
Trout had had a full day already, but it wasn't over yet. Now he saw his Creator leap completely over an automobile.
*
I landed on my hands and knees in the middle of Fairchild Boulevard.
Kazak was flung back by the fence. Gravity took charge of him as it had taken charge of me. Gravity slammed him down on concrete. Kazak was knocked silly.
Kilgore Trout turned away. He hastened anxiously back toward the hospital. I called out to him, but that only made him walk faster.
So I jumped into my car and chased him. I was still high as a kite on adrenaline and coagulants and all that. I did not know yet that I had retracted my testicles in all the excitement. I felt only vague discomfort down there.
Trout was cantering when I came alongside. I clocked him at eleven miles an hour, which was excellent for a man his age. He, too, was now full of adrenaline and coagulants and glucocorticoids.
My windows were rolled down, and I called this to him: "Whoa! Whoa! Mr. Trout! Whoa! Mr. Trout!"
It slowed him down to be called by name.
"Whoa! I'm a friend!" I said. He shuffled to a stop, leaned in panting exhaustion against a fence surrounding an appliance warehouse belonging to the General Electric Company. The company's monogram and motto hung in the night sky behind Kilgore Trout, whose eyes were wild. The motto was this:
PROGRESS IS OUR
MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT
*
"Mr. Trout," I said from the unlighted interior of the car, "you have nothing to fear. I bring you tidings of great joy."
He was slow to get his breath back, so he wasn't much of a conversationalist at first. "Are--are you--from the--the Arts Festival?" he said. His eyes rolled and rolled.
"I am from the Everything Festival," I replied.
"The what?" he said.
I thought it would be a good idea to let him have a good look at me, and so attempted to flick on the dome light. I turned on the windshield washers instead. I turned them off again. My view of the lights of the County Hospital was garbled by beads of water. I pulled at another switch, and it came away in my hand. It was a cigarette lighter. So I had no choice but to continue to speak from darkness.
"Mr. Trout," I said, "I am a novelist, and I created you for use in my books."
"Pardon me?" he said.
"I'm your Creator," I said. "You're in the middle of a book right now--close to the end of it, actually."
"Um," he said.
"Are there any questions you'd like to ask?"
"Pardon me?" he said.
"Feel free to ask anything you wan
t--about the past, about the future," I said. "There's a Nobel Prize in your future:"
"A what?" he said.
"A Nobel Prize in medicine."
"Huh," he said. It was a noncommittal sound.
"I've also arranged for you to have a reputable publisher from now on. No more beaver books for you."
"Um," he said.
"If I were in your spot, I would certainly have lots of questions," I said.
"Do you have a gun?" he said.
I laughed there in the dark, tried to turn on the light again, activated the windshield washer again. "I don't need a gun to control you, Mr. Trout. All I have to do is write down something about you, and that's it."
*
"Are you crazy?" he said.
"No," I said. And I shattered his power to doubt me. I transported him to the Taj Mahal and then to Venice and then to Dar es Salaam and then to the surface of the Sun, where the flames could not consume him--and then back to Midland City again.
The poor old man crashed to his knees. He reminded me of the way my mother and Bunny Hoover's mother used to act whenever somebody tried to take their photographs.
As he cowered there, I transported him to the Bermuda of his childhood, had him contemplate the infertile egg of a Bermuda Em. I took him from there to the Indianapolis of my childhood. I put him in a circus crowd there. I had him see a man with locomotor ataxia and a woman with a goiter as big as a zucchini.
*
I got out of my rented car. I did it noisily, so his ears would tell him a lot about his Creator, even if he was unwilling to use his eyes. I slammed the car door firmly. As I approached him from the driver's side of the car, I swiveled my feet some, so that my footsteps were not only deliberate but gritty, too.
I stopped with the tips of my shoes on the rim of the narrow field of his downcast eyes. "Mr. Trout, I love you," I said gently. "I have broken your mind to pieces. I want to make it whole. I want you to feel a wholeness and inner harmony such as I have never allowed you to feel before. I want you to raise your eyes, to look at what I have in my hand."
I had nothing in my hand, but such was my power over Trout that he would see in it whatever I wished him to see. I might have shown him a Helen of Troy, for instance, only six inches tall.
"Mr. Trout--Kilgore--" I said, "I hold in my hand a symbol of wholeness and harmony and nourishment. It is Oriental in its simplicity, but we are Americans, Kilgore, and not Chinamen. We Americans require symbols which are richly colored and three-dimensional and juicy. Most of all, we hunger for symbols which have not been poisoned by great sins our nation has committed, such as slavery and genocide and criminal neglect, or by tinhorn commercial greed and cunning.
"Look up, Mr. Trout," I said, and I waited patiently. "Kilgore--?"
The old man looked up, and he had my father's wasted face when my father was a widower--when my father was an old old man.
He saw that I held an apple in my hand.
*
"I am approaching my fiftieth birthday, Mr. Trout," I said. "I am cleansing and renewing myself for the very different sorts of years to come. Under similar spiritual conditions, Count Tolstoi freed his serfs. Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves. I am going to set at liberty all the literary characters who have served me so loyally during my writing career.
"You are the only one I am telling. For the others, tonight will be a night like any other night. Arise, Mr. Trout, you are free, you are free."
He arose shamblingly.
I might have shaken his hand, but his right hand was injured, so our hands remained dangling at our sides.
"Bon voyage" I said. I disappeared.
*
I somersaulted lazily and pleasantly through the void, which is my hiding place when I dematerialize. Trout's cries to me faded as the distance between us increased.
His voice was my father's voice. I heard my father--and I saw my mother in the void. My mother stayed far, far away, because she had left me a legacy of suicide.
A small hand mirror floated by. It was a leak with a mother-of-pearl handle and frame. I captured it easily, held it up to my own right eye, which looked like this:
Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me in my father's voice: "Make me young, make me young, make me young!"
KURT VONNEGUT, JR., is the son and grandson of Indianapolis architects. They were painters, too. His only living sibling is a distinguished physicist who discovered, among other things, that silver iodide can sometimes make it snow or rain. This is Mr. Vonnegut's seventh novel. He wrote it mostly in New York City. His six children are full-grown.
BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS
A Dial Press Trade Paperback Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Delacorte Press / Seymour Lawrence hardcover edition published 1973
Delta Trade Paperbacks edition published May 1999
Dial Press Trade Paperback edition / January 2006
Published by
The Dial Press
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright (c) 1973 by Kurt Vonnegut
The Dial Press and Dial Trade Paperbacks are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72013086
eISBN: 978-0-30756723-9
www.dialpress.com
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Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
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