Cat’s Cradle

When I was a much younger man, I began to collect material for a book to be called The Day the World Ended.

The book was to be factual.

The book was to be an account of what important Americans had done on the day when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.

It was to be a Christian book. I was a Christian then.

I am a Bokononist now.

I do not intend that this book be a tract on behalf of Bokononism. I should like to offer a Bokononist warning about it, however. The first sentence in The Books of Bokonon is this:

“All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”

My Bokononist warning is this:

Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.

So be it.

“But he went down on his knees on the carpet next to me, and he showed me his teeth, and he waved that tangle of string in my face. ‘See? See? See?’ he asked. ‘Cat’s cradle. See the cat’s cradle? See where the nice pussycat sleeps? Meow. Meow.’

“His pores looked as big as craters on the moon. His ears and nostrils were stuffed with hair. Cigar smoke made him smell like the mouth of Hell. So close up, my father was the ugliest thing I had ever seen. I dream about it all the time.

“And then he sang. ‘Rockabye catsy, in the tree top’; he sang, ‘when the wind blows, the cray-dull will rock. It the bough breaks, the cray-dull will fall. Down will come cray-dull, catsy, and all.’”

There are lots of other good anecdotes about the bomb and Father, from other days. For instance, do you know the story about Father on the day they first tested a bomb out at Alamogordo? After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, ‘Science has now known sin.’ And do you know what Father said? He said, ‘What is sin?’

“Here, and shockingly few other places in this country, men are paid to increase knowledge, to work toward no end but that.”

“That’s very generous of General Forge and Foundry Company.”

“Nothing generous about it. New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.”

Had I been a Bokononist then, that statement would have made me howl.

“If the streams flowing through the swamp froze as ice-nine, what about the rivers and lakes the streams fed?”

“They’d freeze. But there is no such thing as ice-nine.”

“And the oceans the frozen rivers fed?”

“They’d freeze, of course,” he snapped. “I sup­pose you’re going to rush to market with a sensational story about ice-nine now. I tell you again, it does not exist!”

“And the springs feeding the frozen lakes and streams, and all the water underground feeding the springs?”

“They’d freeze, damn it!” he cried. “But if I had known that you were a member of the yellow press,” he said grandly, rising to his feet, “I wouldn’t have wasted a minute with you!”

“And the rain?”

“When it fell, it would freeze into hard little hob­ nails of ice-nine—and that would be the end of the world! And the end of the interview, too! Good-bye!”

“The Republic of San Lorenzo,” said the copy on the cover, “on the move! A healthy, happy, progressive, freedom-loving, beautiful nation makes itself extremely attractive to American investors and tourists alike.”

“Whenever I meet a young Hoosier, I tell them, ‘You call me Mom.’”

“Uh huh.”

“Let me hear you say it,” she urged.

“Mom?”

She smiled and let go of my arm. Some piece of clockwork had completed its cycle. My calling Hazel “Mom” had shut it off, and now Hazel was rewinding it for the next Hoosier to come along.

Hazel’s obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon.

“Welcome,” said “Papa.”

“You are coming to the best friend America ever had. America is misunderstood many places, but not here, Mr. Ambassador.” He bowed to H. Lowe Crosby, the bicycle manufacturer, mistaking him for the new Ambassador.

“I know you’ve got a good country here, Mr. President,” said Crosby. “Everything I ever heard about it sounds great to me. There’s just one thing…”

“Oh?”

“I’m not the Ambassador,” said Crosby. “I wish I was, but I’m just a plain, ordinary businessman.”

What I had seen, of course, was the Bokononist ritual of boko-maru, or the mingling of awarenesses.

We Bokononists believe that it is impossible to be sole-to-sole with another person without loving the person, provided the feet of both persons are clean and nicely tended.

The basis for the foot ceremony is this “Calypso”:

We will touch our feet, yes,
Yes, for all we’re worth,
And we will love each other, yes,
Yes, like we love our Mother Earth.

“Oh, yes. Anyway, one sleepless night I stayed up with Father while he worked. It was all we could do to find a live patient to treat. In bed after bed after bed we found dead people.

“And Father started giggling,” Castle continued.

“He couldn’t stop. He walked out into the night with his flashlight. He was still giggling. He was mak­ing the flashlight beam dance over all the dead people stacked outside. He put his hand on my head, and do you know what that marvelous man said to me?” asked Castle.

“Nope.”

“‘Son,’ my father said to me, ‘someday this will all be yours.’”

“He was in the S.S. for fourteen years. He was a camp physician at Auschwitz for six of those years.”

“Doing penance at the House of Hope and Mercy is he?”

“Yes,” said Castle, “and making great strides, too, saving lives right and left.”

“Good for him.”

“Yes. If he keeps going at his present rate, work­ing night and day, the number of people he’s saved will equal the number of people he let die—in the year 3010.”

From what Frank had said before he slammed the door, I gathered that the Republic of San Lorenzo and the three Hoenikkers weren’t the only ones who had ice-nine. Apparently the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had it, too. The United States had obtained it through Angela’s husband, whose plant in Indianapolis was understand­ably surrounded by electrified fences and homicidal German shepherds. And Soviet Russia had come by it through Newt’s little Zinka, that winsome troll of Ukrainian ballet.

If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.