Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! by Kurt Vonnegut

Author:Kurt Vonnegut
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Kings and rulers, Fantasy fiction, Satire, Presidents - United States, General, United States, Presidents, Black humor, Fiction
ISBN: 9780385334235
Publisher: Dial Press
Published: 1999-04-15T09:50:21+00:00

24

I ASSUMED THAT ELIZA had now assaulted my self-respect with every weapon she had. I had somehow survived.

Without pride, with a clinical and cynical sort of interest, I noted that I had a cast-iron character which would repel attacks, apparently, even if I declined to put up defenses of any other kind.

How wrong I was about Eliza’s having expended her fury!

Her opening attacks had been aimed merely at exposing the cast iron in my character. She had merely sent out light patrols to cut down the trees and shrubs in front of my character, to strip it of its vines, so to speak.

And now, without my realizing it, the shell of my character stood before her concealed howitzers at nearly point-blank range, as naked and brittle as a Franklin stove.

Hi ho.

• • •

There was a lull. Eliza prowled about my livingroom, looking at my books, which she couldn’t read, of course. Then she returned to me, and she cocked her head, and she said, “People get into Harvard Medical School because they can read and write?”

“I worked very hard, Eliza,” I said. “It wasn’t easy for me. It isn’t easy now.”

“If Bobby Brown becomes a doctor,” she said, “that will be the strongest argument I ever heard for the Christian Scientists.”

“I will not be the best doctor there ever was,” I said. “I won’t be the worst, either.”

“You might be a very good man with a gong,” she said. She was alluding to recent rumors that the Chinese had had remarkable successes in treating breast cancer with the music of ancient gongs. “You look like a man,” she said, “who could hit a gong almost every time.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Touch me,” she said.

“Pardon me?” I said.

“I’m your own flesh. I’m your sister. Touch me,” she said.

“Yes, of course,” I said. But my arms seemed queerly paralyzed.

• • •

“Take your time,” she said.

“Well—” I said, “since you hate me so—”

“I hate Bobby Brown,” she said.

“Since you hate Bobby Brown—” I said.

“And Betty Brown,” she said.

“That was so long ago,” I said.

“Touch me,” she said.

“Oh, Christ, Eliza!” I said. My arms still wouldn’t move.

“I’ll touch you,” she said.

“Whatever you say,” I said. I was scared stiff.

“You don’t have a heart condition, do you Wilbur?” she said.

“No,” I said.

“If I touch you, you promise you won’t die?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Maybe I’ll die,” she said.

“I hope not,” I said.

“Just because I act like I know what’s going to happen,” she said, “doesn’t mean I know what’s going to happen. Maybe nothing will happen.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“I’ve never seen you so frightened,” she said.

“I’m human,” I said.

“You want to tell Normie what you’re scared about?” she said.

“No,” I said.

• • •

Eliza, with her fingertips almost brushing my cheek, quoted from a dirty joke Withers Witherspoon had told another servant when we were children. We had heard it through a wall. The joke had to do with a woman who was wildly responsive during sexual intercourse. In the joke, the woman warned a stranger who was beginning to make love to her.

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