Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: Bookmarked. Curtis Smith
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for wouldn’t be found at a party or a bar. The happiness I would cherish would be intimate. Solitary. Give me a blank page and a pen. Give me a hand to hold. Give me a trail to walk with my son. Give me the struggle of trying to comprehend what speaks to me. Why? I ask. Why?
Sometimes I wish I could read a cherished book again for the first time. The surprise, the freshness, the audacity of language, the beauty of making connections—they would once more be mine to experience. The first time I read Slaughterhouse-Five I had yet to kiss a girl. I had yet to suffer the loss of a loved one. The fifteen-year-old believed that through the sheer act of being, he would make the world sit up and notice. Today I am older. Humbled. Grateful to simply count myself among the living.
I shiver in the unblocked wind. My son has his own questions today, and we talk about whatever he likes. We sit upon the cold rocks. The two of us part of this beautiful scene. The two of us asking why.
*
“Time is the longest distance between two places.”
—Tennessee Williams
*
ABOVE YOU THE STEPS OF GIANTS THE TREMBLING EARTH YOU IN ITS BOWELS AND HOW CONVENIENT THAT YOU’VE LINED YOURSELF IN THIS TOMB YOUR HANDS OVER YOUR HEAD A RAIN OF PLASTER AND PAINT AND WHAT GOOD WOULD YOUR HUDDLED POSE DO IF THE CEILING CAVED THE TONS OF EARTH YOUR BURIAL COMPLETE BUT YOU HOLD THE POSE AN ABSURD REFLEX AS IF YOU HAVE ANY SAY-SO IN THIS NIGHTMARE AND THE SHAKING CONTINUES THE GIANTS ON THE MARCH THEIR STEPS NEAR THEN FAR THEN NEAR AGAIN AND YOU’RE TRAPPED IN THIS HOLLOW SPACE AND WITHIN YOU AN ECHOING OF OTHER HOLLOW SPACES PRIVATE SPACES AND NO ONE SLEEPS AND WHEN THE BARRAGE HALTS YOU GUESS IT’S DAWN ALTHOUGH YOU CAN’T BE SURE
*
I stand along the creek’s edge. A fifty-yard reach to the opposite shore, these past two days of rain. Silt and smooth stones underfoot, the white dotting of Asiatic clams. The shoreline with its curves and hollows. The fishermen’s trash. A length of gnarled siding wrapped around a tree, a reminder of last autumn’s floods. I throw stones, the Osages’ green balls. The current swift, my offerings short-lived. A splash. Gone.
Billy Pilgrim, through his interactions with benevolent aliens, came to see human life as liquid, a flowing state. To die is to stop flowing. So it goes. The greater stream flows on, and the droplets that evaporate into the atmosphere and the splashes that wash the shore mean nothing. The communal tide that claims us today flows on, and in its churning, part of us must remain. All those years of collisions and jostlings. The love and fights and kindnesses shared. The echoes of this kinetic dance.
The laws of chemistry state that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, and in this light, can a moment—a moment made of all that is concrete and tangible—really disappear? Perhaps this living second is another form of matter, at least in the deeply racked focus of the fourth dimension. Shift from the chemist to the physicist. He needs the past to exist; without its anchor, his attempts to calculate velocity and acceleration, growth and decay, would float off, lost in a world that couldn’t lay claim to its past.
I leave the water and make my way back to the trail. The flow behind me and within.
*
In 1937, between 9,000 and 20,000 Haitian Creoles were killed on the order of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trajillo. The murders were brutal—machetes and clubs. Men, women, children. Many bodies were cast into the Massacre River, a waterway named after an earlier ugliness between the Spanish and French. The bodies, bloated as the days passed, flowed to the sea.
How did two tribes who shared the same sunny island tell each other apart? Dominican solders were said to have carried sprigs of parsley and then ask suspected Haitian Creoles to pronounce its Spanish name, “perejil.” Those whose first language was Creole had difficulty saying the word, a fault of translation and phonics. Those who failed were cut down along with their families.
History has christened it “The Parsley Massacre.”
*
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
—Voltaire
*
I am twenty-five. It’s been a night of poor decisions, and now it’s after midnight, summer rain on the fields. Every so often, a lightning flash, white tendrils hotter than the sun, moments of illumination and then darkness again. The road, black and slick, disappears beneath our rushing headlights. My friend is in no condition to drive, but neither am I. Wind whips through the windows. We laugh at nothing, the stereo too loud. We come upon a sharp turn, a dogleg that no doubt dates back generations, a boundary between farms, a cattle path long paved over. We’re going too fast, the road too wet, and the truth of physics is born out—velocity, friction, deceleration, centripetal motion, our car turning then spinning. I see a farmhouse and barn, a swirling of dark pastures and distant lights.
We slide off the road, backend first, and not two feet from my window, a wide-trunked oak, close enough to touch, to smell. We come to a stop. My heart pounds. Our laughter is a reflex of shock and the starshine of adrenaline.
In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut and his war buddy Bernard O’Hare return to Dresden. There, they befriend a local taxi driver, a man whose mother was incinerated in the firestorm. The following Christmas, the taxi driver sends O’Hare a postcard that ends with: “I hope that we’ll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxicab if the accident will.”
If the accident will. Free will, that earthly concept that so perplexed the Tralfamadorians, is our gift, but free will’s power dwindles beside the impact of accidents. If the accident will our cell cycles won’t turn upon us and generate the tumor that spells the beginning of the end. If the accident will the lockdowns at our children’s schools will only be drills. If the accident will the trees our cars skid by won’t slam against our skulls, our brains scrambled and darkness forever. If the accident will—and I think of the separated-at-birth twins reunited as gray adults, the traveler who missed his flight on the airplane that went down in flames. So much depends upon if the accident will.
I look back, five decades, and as Billy Pilgrim’s mother asked, “How did I get so old?” The years stretch behind me, my memories fading at a rate beyond the quantifying powers of mathematicians. I have lived one life, and in each moment, I have made one decision, and thus, from the vantage point of a man closer to death than he’d like to admit, my days appear as single path. There are turns, yes, loops and double-backs, yet my perception of the fourth dimension constricts me from seeing it otherwise.
Consider our actions, our actual physical doings, as a kind of electric charge. String these together and behold the arc of our lives, a lightning bolt across the sky, yet beneath this illuminated heartbeat there exist a million filaments left dark, the branching nexus of choices unmade, the routes untraveled. All is not the will of accidents, yet so much is accidental, and another image comes to mind, the popular game of pachinko, which in this context, might look like this—
*
Famous accidental discoveries—Velcro, Viagra, dynamite, the Slinky, LSD, Teflon, the X-ray, the microwave, corn flakes.
*
Listen to the Tralfamadorian advise Billy Pilgrim on the nature of human suffering: “Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.” The message is seductive, its peace, its acceptance. The words flow, a simple mantra, a balm no different than man’s other balms. His religions. His delusions and distractions. His powders and spirits.
I also enjoy pretty things, but I can’t look at them all the time. Neither does Vonnegut. Consider all the pretty things he offers for our viewing. The corpse mines of Dresden. The candles made from the fat of slaughtered Jews. The dead eyes of Russian prisoners. Billy’s breakdowns, his estrangement from his children. The Tralfamadorians, with their passivity and denial of free will, bring us a mindset every bit as culpable as the Nazis and Bomber Command and all