Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: Bookmarked. Curtis Smith
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I started this project, I retrieved my copy of Slaughterhouse-Five from its shelf. The book had followed me over the years, packed and unpacked, a haze of a half-dozen apartments before we settled into our house. Years before the pages had come loose in chunks. Before my rereading, I took an evening to restore the book. I applied clear shipping tape to the cover. A new binding of duct-tape strips and a rejoining of the spine with super glue. Imperfect but passable. I held the cover and pulled back my thumb, a fanning of yellowed pages, a scent I hope my son will still cherish. I began to read. I underlined passages, and with the first page’s tear, I employed a lighter touch. I rejoined an echo, the person I was before the deterioration of cartilage and bone, before the adult’s humbling knowledge of how much was beyond me. Hello, young man, I called across the decades. Hello!
A few years ago I was rooting through our basement, and in box, I found a packet of old photographs. My early college days. Dorm life. Parties. A young me spinning a Frisbee on his finger. In the box’s bottom, a glimpse of red, and I pulled out the slender notebook I hadn’t held in years. Inside, the dream journal I penned as a freshman. I’d conditioned myself to wake and write, pages of bleary sentences, my penmanship a sloppy flirting with the printed lines. I sat amid the basement clutter and began to read. I was astonished how vivid the dreams were, their hues vibrant, my memory so often choked with soot and chalk. The photographs were two-dimensional proof of young faces and dated fashions, but the dreams I now revisited pulled at me, a tug in my gut. Here waited another brand of memory, one cooked up in my subconscious and played out in a code I’d never understand.
I turned another page of Slaughterhouse-Five and carefully penned a note in the margin. The teenager who first read these pages was gone, but he also waited, drifting, still breathing in my dreams.
*
“What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, ‘This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!’ Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, ‘Never have I heard anything more divine’?”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
*
Twenty years have passed. I’m doing my best to remember, but my brain is filled with detritus, and conjured ghosts have taken the place of facts. Forgive me . . .
I am an agnostic in a beautiful church. The space majestic, high ceilings, adornments simple and modern, the stained glass dark on this mild, fall evening. Our tickets are collected at the door, and we find a spot in a pew near the back. The event sold out, the chapel’s capacity a bit over five hundred. More file in, and we scoot over, making room. A hundred different conversations, a haze of voices that evaporates when the English Department Chair steps to the pulpit. Thanks are given to the endowments that have made this all possible, then the introduction.
Applause greets the guest as he rises to the microphone. I am thirty-five, the years before the blurring of my vision, and despite our distance, I see him clearly, the brown jacket and blue shirt, the unruly hair. He begins to speak, and the persona he projects—humble yet sharp, self-effacing, insightful—meshes perfectly with the voice I have come to know through the artifice of a dozen novels.
Fifty years have passed since Dresden. He talks about the firebombing and the slaughterhouse, specifics in one man’s story that form a frame for a larger, sadder picture of all wars. Dresden, he contends, wasn’t a tragedy. Dresden was just a turn of an endless wheel. Dresden was our horror and our fate.
Yet the mood is light. There are flowers on the altar and smiles all around. Vonnegut praises the everyday saints, the good people who behave decently in an indecent world. He confesses his secret passion for the woman who works at his local post-office window and the happiness he finds in the suddenly quaint ritual of mailing an envelope. He claims he’s suing R. J. Reynolds because his beloved Pall Malls haven’t killed him already. I laugh with the others even though I’ve heard some of this before, threads repeated from his recent essays, and I wonder if I’m listening to Kurt Vonnegut or another Billy Pilgrim.
He ends with a Q & A, but then claims the first and only question. He asks if we’ve ever had a teacher who’s made a difference, and if so, would we please tell the person next to us their name. He thanks us, wishes us well, and says goodnight. A murmur rises in the chapel and the names of teachers are exchanged, the space filling with the memories of those who’ve remained with us all these years. The ones who shaped and challenged us. The ones who guided us when we were lost. My wife and I step back into the night. Cooler now, the stars crisp. I think of the wheels that turn with or without me. I think of the life within my grasp and the blessings of everyday saints.
*
Researchers at Anglia Ruskin University have been analyzing texts from ancient Mesopotamia. The accounts, which date back to 1300 BC and the early days of the Assyrian Dynasty, describe accounts of men who’d survived battle but who were then haunted by ghosts. The faces of fallen comrades. The men they’d slain.
*
The Tralfamadorians told Billy Pilgrim that one time was all time. Our flesh is a vessel, and time fills us, and when the brain’s neuron storm goes dark, the liquid and flowing parts of our lives end. We are emptied, but the time we’ve lived is never gone. Our breathing days still exist—but only in a manner we have yet to comprehend.
The nature of time, the inevitability of death, the atrocities we so readily commit, and how we carry the memories of what we’ve seen—these form the novel’s crux, yet they are not separate strains. Becoming unstuck in time was Billy’s reflex to the nightmare of war. He tumbles heedlessly through his years. He sees his death. He can—and can’t—escape his time as a soldier and prisoner. Critics have combed the pages and unearthed a number of inaccuracies in Billy Pilgrim’s chronology. The years and months are sometimes skewed, the math of ages and anniversaries not adding up. Yet this is how we really perceive time, markings made with the vagaries of the heart.
On his travels through space, Billy Pilgrim asks the Tralfamadorians for something to read. Yes, they have books, but they tell Billy he wouldn’t understand them. The linear spine has been removed from their novels. Their books don’t contain a breadcrumb trail of clues or a convenient A-to-B trajectory. Rather, they are pools that churn with overlapping layers of events and time. The Tralfamadorians tell Billy what they love about their books “are the depths of the many marvelous moments seen all at once.”
A school morning, winter dark upon the windows. The sun yet to rise. I’m knotting my tie as I roust my son. “Time to get up, bud.” He’s sleepy, his waking moments sluggish, payback for his night-owl ways. Years ago, we developed a ritual, the invitation of a piggyback ride to the breakfast table. I ask; he says yes. Another ritual—the offer of a countdown. “Ten seconds?” I ask. “Fifteen?”
He rubs his eyes. “Is twenty OK?”
I begin, the count altered to include his latest fascination, the history of pandemics. “Twenty . . . nineteen-eighteen was the year of the Spanish Flu . . . seventeen . . . sixteen . . . fifteen . . . fourteen . . . thirteen forty-seven was when the Black Plague hit Italy . . . twelve . . . eleven . . .”
He rises like a boxer off the canvas, covers tossed aside, and leaps onto my waiting back. He is eleven, lean yet solid. He can hold a plank longer than me. He has a knack for running, light steps and a tireless engine, and on our jogs, he’s now the one now must loop back. A balance has shifted, a tide of strength destined to grow. We go down the steps. I joke that our days for such rides are numbered, that someday he may be the one carrying me. He is warm against me, his breath, his body.
We have made this trek a thousand times. Here, I understand a little more about the beauty of the Tralfamadorian novel, the wonder of wading into a past that hits all at once. This house, this stairwell, my son on my back. This indulgence. This embrace. The vision of one time as all time and a heart so full.
*