Boston, and off we'd go. But Boston was socked in, so the plane flew straight to
Frankfurt from Philadelphia. And I became a non-person in the Boston Fog, and
Lufthansa put me in a limousine with some other non-persons and sent us to a motel for a
non-night.
The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only with the
electric clocks, but the wind-up kind, too. The second hand on my watch would twitch
once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.
There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling., I had to believe whatever
clocks said-and calendars.
I had two books with me, which I'd meant to read on the plane. One was Words for the
Wind, by Theodore Roethke, and this is what I found in there:
I wake to steep, and take my waking slow.
I feet my late in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
My other book was Erika Ostrovsky's Céline and His Vision. Céline was a brave
French soldier in the First World War-until his skull was cracked. After that he couldn't
sleep, and there were noises in his head. He became a doctor, and he treated poor people
in the daytime, and he wrote grotesque novels all night. No art is possible without a dance
with death, he wrote.
The truth is death, he wrote. I've fought nicely against it as long as I could ... danced
with it, festooned it, waltzed it around ... decorated it with streamers, titillated it...
Time obsessed him. Miss Ostrovsky reminded me of the amazing scene in Death on the
Installment Plan where Céline wants to stop the bustling of a street crowd. He screams on
paper, Make them stop ... don't let them move anymore at all ... There, make them freeze
... once and for all! ... So that they won't disappear anymore!
I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. The
sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained
upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and
He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that
which grew upon the ground.
So it goes.
Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off
without them.
And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their
homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
She was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.
People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.
I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.
This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins
like this:
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
It ends like this:
Poo-tee-weet?
Two
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has
walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back
through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he
says, and pays random visits to all the events in between.
He says.
Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren't
necessarily fun. He is 'm a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows
what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.
Billy was bon in 1922 in Ilium, New York, the only child of a barber there. He was a
funny-looking child who became a funny-looking youth-tall and weak, and shaped like a
bottle of Coca-Cola. He graduated from Ilium High School in the upper third of his class,
and attended night sessions at the Ilium School of Optometry for one semester before
being drafted for military service in the Second World War. His father died in a hunting
accident during the war. So it goes.
Billy saw service with the infantry in Europe, and was taken prisoner by the Germans.
After his honorable discharge from the Army in 1945, Billy again enrolled in the Ilium
School of Optometry. During his senior year there, he became engaged to the daughter
of the founder and owner of the school, and then suffered a mild nervous collapse.
He was treated in a veterans' hospital near Lake Placid, and was given shock
treatments and released. He married his fiancée, finished his education, and was set up in
business in Ilium by his father-in-law. Ilium is a particularly good city for optometrists
because the General Forge and Foundry Company is there. Every employee is required
to own a pair of safety glasses, and to wear them in areas where manufacturing is going
on. GF&F has sixty-eight thousand employees in Ilium. That calls for a lot of lenses and
a lot of frames.
Frames are where the money is.
Bill became rich. He had two children, Barbara and Robert. In time, his daughter
Barbara married another optometrist., and Billy set him up in business. Billy's son Robert
had a lot of trouble in high school, but then he joined the famous Green Berets. He
straightened out, became a fine Young man, and he fought in Vietnam.
Early in 1968, a group of optometrists, with Billy among them, chartered an airplane to
fly them from Ilium to an international convention of optometrists in Montreal. The plane
crashed on top of Sugarbush Mountain, in Vermont. Everybody was killed but Billy. So
it goes.
While Billy was recuperating in a hospital in Vermont, his wife died accidentally of
carbon-monoxide poisoning. So it goes.
When Billy finally got home to Ilium after the airplane crash, he was quiet for a while.
He had a terrible scar across the top Of his skull. He didn't resume practice. He had a
housekeeper. His daughter came over almost every day.
And then, without any warning, Billy went to New York City, and got on an all-night
radio program devoted to talk. He told about having come unstuck in time. He said, too,
that he had been kidnapped by a flying saucer in 1967. The saucer was from the planet
Tralfamadore, he said. He was taken to Tralfamadore, where he was displayed naked in a
zoo, he said. He was mated there with a former Earthling movie star named Montana
Wildhack.
Some night owls in Ilium heard Billy on the radio, and one of them called Billy's
daughter Barbara. Barbara was upset. She and her husband went down to New York and
brought Billy home. Billy insisted mildly that everything he had said on the radio was
true. He said he had been kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians on the night of his daughter's
wedding. He hadn't been missed, he said, because the Tralfamadorians had taken him
through a time warp, so that he could be on Tralfamadore for years, and still be away
from Earth for only a microsecond.
Another month went by without incident, and then Billy wrote a letter to the Ilium
News Leader, which the paper published. It described the creatures from Tralfamadore.
The letter said that they were two feet high, and green., and shaped like plumber's
friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely
flexible, usually pointed to the sky. At the top of each shaft was a little hand with a green
eye in its palm. The creatures were friendly, and they could see in four dimensions. They
pitied Earthlings for being able to see only three. They had many wonderful things to
teach Earthlings, especially about time. Billy promised to tell what some of those
wonderful things were in his next letter.
Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was published. The second
letter started out like this:
'The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he
only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to
cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will
exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can
look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all
the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an
illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a
string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
'When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad
condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other
moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what
the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "so it goes."'
And so on.
Billy was working on this letter in the basement rumpus room of his empty house. It
was his housekeeper's day off. There was an old typewriter in the rumpus room. It was a
beast. It weighed as much as a storage battery. Billy couldn't carry it very far very easily,
which was why he was writing in the rumpus room instead of somewhere else.
The oil burner had quit. A mouse had eaten through the insulation of a wire leading to
the thermostat. The temperature in the house was down to fifty degrees, but Billy hadn't
noticed. He wasn't warmly dressed, either. He was barefoot, and still in his pajamas and a
bathrobe, though it was late afternoon. His bare feet were blue and ivory.
The cockles of Billy's heart, at any rate, were glowing coals. What made them so hot was
Billy's belief that he was going to comfort so many people with the truth about time. His
door chimes upstairs had been ringing and ringing. It was his daughter Barbara up there
wanting in. Now she let herself in with a key, crossed the floor over his head calling,
'Father? Daddy, where are you?' And so on.
Billy didn't answer her, so she was nearly hysterical, expecting to find his corpse. And
then she looked into the very last place there was to look-which was the rumpus room.
'Why didn't you answer me when I called?' Barbara wanted to know, standing there in
the door of the rumpus room. She had the afternoon paper with her, the one in which
Billy described his friends from Tralfamadore.
'I didn't hear you,' said Billy.
The orchestration of the moment was this: Barbara was only twenty-one years old, but
she thought her father was senile, even though he was only forty-six-senile because of
damage to his brain in the airplane crash. She also thought that she was head of the
family, since she had had to manage her mother's funeral, since she had to get a
housekeeper for Billy, and all that. Also, Barbara and her husband were having to look
after Billy's business interests, which were considerable, since Billy didn't seem to give a
damn for business any more. All this responsibility at such an early age made her a bitchy
flibbertigibbet. And Billy, meanwhile, was trying to hang onto his dignity, to persuade
Barbara and everybody else that he was far from senile, that, on the contrary, he was
devoting himself to a calling much higher than mere business.
He was doing nothing less now, he thought, then 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 Ws 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. ' Bill'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 the Second World War 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 olivedrab
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
