Sucker's Portfolio

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

he read and reread the definition of the word between timid and Timbuktu: “the general idea, relation, or fact of continuous or successive existence.” Impatiently, David snapped the book shut between his long fingers. The word was time.

He daydreamed of beings infinitely wiser than men, with more senses than mankind’s five; beings who could tell him about time. He thought of visitors from space bringing an understanding of time because it seemed beyond the limits of human minds — far beyond. Perhaps there were in the universe forms of life — the flying-saucer men, say — who scampered through time wherever their fancy took them. They would laugh at earth men, to whom time was a one-way street with a dead end in sight.

Time had fogged, flattened, cooled the precious image. He could remember that the afternoon had been vital, happy, perfect. He could no longer see it clearly…

David worked over the body on the slope. He lost track of how long he had been working to wring death out of the farmer’s lungs. Up, over, press, relax…up, over, press, relax… How long had it been since he had shouted to a small boy on the road to get a doctor? Up, over… No flicker of life in the gaping white face. David’s arms and shoulders ached; he could no longer close his hands into fists. Time had won again — had stolen another human being from those who loved him. Suddenly, David was aware that he had been talking aloud the whole time, angrily — that he was behaving, not with the grave concern of a man saving a life, but with the rage of a brawler. He felt no emotion toward the man under his hands, felt only hate for their common tormentor — time.

“Back from the dead,” whispered David, awed. “If you like being melodramatic about it, we’re bringing him back from the dead, I suppose,” said Dr. Boyle, lighting a cigarette, keeping his eyes on the drowned man’s face. “Did we or didn’t we?” “A matter of defining your terms,” said Boyle. It was obvious that the subject bored him. “Drowned men, electrocuted men, suffocated men, they’re usually perfectly good men — good lungs, good heart, kidneys, liver, everything in first-rate shape. They’re dead is all. If you catch a situation like that quick enough, sometimes you can do something with it.” He gave the farmer another injection, this time in the arm. “Yep, back from the dead for a few more years of fishing.”

“How do you know it isn’t true?” Boyles sighed condescendingly. “Does an intelligent man like you really need to have someone else give him the reason?” He raised his eyebrows. “If his life did pass before his eyes, his brain was what saw it. That’s all anybody’s got to see with. If his heart stops pumping, his brain doesn’t get any blood. It can’t work without blood. His brain couldn’t work. Therefore, he couldn’t see his life passing before his eyes. Q.E.D, quod erat demonstrandum, as they said in Rome and your high-school geometry class — what was to be demonstrated is demonstrated.”

“Boyle, I’ve got proof that the old man’s life really did pass before his eyes. He traveled back in time to 1893!” “He should have shot your grandfather while he was back there. Maybe I’d have a minute’s peace now to finish this paper.”

He trembled slightly, keeping his temper in check. This smug little doctor, on whom so much depended, hadn’t a grain of curiosity or imagination. He could not see that time — not cancer or heart disease or any other disease in his books — was the most frightening, crippling plague of mankind.

“Dr. Boyle’s office.” It was the nurse’s voice. She managed by her tone to convey that whoever was calling, whatever his business might be, he was imposing trivia on a vastly important organization.

Nature would be seeming to sympathize with macabre doings in the studio. Desultory rain from a pocket of warmth thousands of feet above earth spattered and froze on the windowsills.

Roughly three and a half hours to go. Three and a half hours without character, promise, or purpose. There was nothing more he had to do, nothing that could possibly interest him. He felt like a traveler between trains in a small town on Sunday, without the wish or hope of seeing a familiar face, smoking cigarette after bitter cigarette. He seemed without identity even to himself until he could be on his way. Idly, he tested the bars on a window.

His gaze fell naturally upon a disordered corner by the door. At first he attached no importance to the objects jumbled there. With a feeling of mild confusion and surprise, he recognized them — his canvases, his easel, his paints. He found it hard to believe that he had once been a painter — only months before — and that this room, with the bars and the straps and the needles, had once been the birthplace of still lifes, of affectionate portraits, of sentimental landscapes. For a moment, the room became ugly and frightening, and David wanted to tear down the bars, cover the straps with the warm, red carpet; to tell Boyle not to come, to invite forgotten friends to a rousing party. The feeling passed. David’s expression became shrewd, purposeful again. His old enemy, time, was trying to discourage him, to break him down in the few hours remaining. If he thought about the experiment much longer, he might lose his nerve before the expedition through time could begin.

Bryce had never acted before. All he had done for the club was dip punch during intermissions. I remember what John Sherwood, the electrical contractor, said about Bryce dipping punch: “That job is neither too big nor too little for that boy.” That summed up Bryce very well.

The boy was seventeen, tall, still growing — as graceless as a homemade stepladder. His wrists were thick, his shoulders still narrow. His feet and hands were big, and his legs were long, sweeping him through the woods with the gait of a man on stilts. His face was the face of a sweet, grave child, surprised at being up so high in the air for so long.

I didn’t plan to drink much, but in the nightmare of the Club Joy there was nothing to do but drink. Drinking was a physical necessity for those who weren’t born numb.

The fight was brief and unambiguous. Flemming got himself a bloody nose without laying a finger on Eddie Wetzel.

“You could still go back to your wife and job — if you want,” said Arlene. “Everybody would understand.” “If I want,” echoed Flemming. “You, my dear, are all I want.” “You don’t even know me,” said Arlene. She turned to Eddie. “Neither do you,” she said. “I’m just the idea of a pretty girl to both of you. The girl inside of me could change every five minutes, and neither one of you would notice. I think you must have been the same way with your wife,” she said to Eddie. “I was very good to my wife,” said Eddie. “The way you ignore what a woman really is,” said Arlene, “a woman has to do all kinds of crazy things just to prove to herself that she’s really alive. She’d never find out she was alive from you,” she said. “When a girl does something bad,” she said, “it’s usually on account of somebody isn’t paying enough attention to her.” She turned to Flemming. “Thank you for making me so famous,” she said. And she left.

The great graphic artist Saul Steinberg, a native of Romania, now a resident of New York City, thanks to Christopher Columbus and Adolf Hitler, told me once that he could not commit political history to memory — when Caesar lived, when Napoleon lived, and so on — until he related it to what artists were doing at such and such a time. Art history was what he was born to care about. He made art history a spine to which to attach whatever else might have been going on. My big brother, the physical chemist Dr. Bernard Vonnegut, who studies the electrification of thunderstorms, gives his view of history a spine of scientific insights — Newton’s Laws of Motion and Einstein’s E=mc2 and so on — to which he attaches kings and generals and politicians and explorers and so on. I myself, as a writer, make a spine of works of literature. But most United States citizens, without such specialized enthusiasms, have been given by their teachers a spine of dates to memorize, most prominent among them 1066, when the Normans invaded England, since we all get English history and attitudes along with the language; and 1492, without which we wouldn’t exist; and 1776, when we became a beacon of liberty to the rest of the world, slavery and all; and 1941, December 7, to be exact, when the Japanese, without warning, sank a lot of our fleet at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands, on, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “a date which will live in infamy.” But making a spine for history out of memoriz...

We like to pretend that so many important discoveries have been made on a certain day, unexpectedly, by one person rather than by a system seeking such knowledge, I think, because we hope that life is like a lottery, where simply anyone can come up with a winning ticket.

“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime,” said Balzac, alluding to European aristocrats who imagined themselves to be descended from anything other than sociopaths. Count Dracula comes to mind. Yes, and the coinage of every Western Hemisphere nation might well be stamped with Balzac’s words, to remind even the most recent arrivals here from the other half of the planet, perhaps Vietnamese, that they are legatees of maniacs like Columbus,

we can scarcely opine that Germans are gentler, kinder, saner than other Europeans. Would we dare? Does anybody perchance remember World War II? For those who never heard of it and its gruesome preamble, there are movies they can see. Word of honor, it really happened. All of it.

Another native German Heinrich, Heinrich Böll, a great writer, and I became friends even though we had once been corporals in opposing armies. I asked him once what he believed to be the basic flaw in the character of Germans, and he replied “obedience.” When I consider the ghastly orders obeyed by underlings of Columbus, or of Aztec priests supervising human sacrifices, or of senile Chinese bureaucrats wishing to silence unarmed, peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square only three years ago as I write, I have to wonder if obedience isn’t the basic flaw in most of humankind.

The key words in the previous paragraph are “TV” and “bulldozers.” These are man-made devices that, like rockets and artillery and war planes, and like the most expensive individual artifacts ever made by Homo sapiens, nuclear submarines, do more to comfort chicken-hearted underlings, should they be ordered to commit atrocities, than any inspirational speech by Columbus or Heinrich Himmler. I myself would not have thought of a bulldozer as such an instrument, had I not been trained during World War II to operate the largest tractors then used by our army, not for bulldozing, as it happened, but for dragging siege howitzers (240 mm) over rough terrain. If a blade had been fixed on the front of one, I might have bulldozed just about anything, with only a dim idea of what all was actually happening up front or underneath, as I sat high in the air, atop a lurching, quaking, roaring, clanking, cosmically insensitive juggernaut.

My adopted son Steve Adams wrote funny stuff for TV out in Los Angeles for a while. He made a lot of money, but he had to quit. He could not stand it anymore that every joke he wrote had to refer to something that had been big news on TV during the past two weeks. Otherwise, his audience wouldn’t know what he was having fun with. TV was expected to be a great teacher, but its shows are so well done that it has become the only teacher, and an awful teacher, since there is no way for it to make its students learn by doing something. Worst of all, it keeps saying that whatever it has taught in the past doesn’t matter anymore, that it has found something much more entertaining for us to look at. So the wake of North American TV is something like the wake of a bulldozer, in which everything has been made nice and neat, dead level and lifeless and featureless. But a better analogue of TV’s wake in the space-time continuum is a black hole into which even the greatest crimes and stupidities, and indeed whole continents, if need be, can be made to disappear from our consciousness.

The Second Amendment, written by the Anglo James Madison, a slave owner, says, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” As long as the poor people in this country kill each other, which is what so many of them are doing day after day, the federal government, obviously, is content to regard them, as Columbus might have done, as a well-regulated militia.

We are all so often bad news for somebody else. AIDS, I read somewhere, was probably brought into this country by a Canadian flight attendant on an international flight. And what had his crime been? Nothing but love, love, love. That’s life sometimes. And he is surely as dead as Columbus now. And I’m killing the world with garbage, three cans a week, sort of like Chinese water torture.

This part of Long Island has become a summer resort for some of the wealthiest human beings in history so far, many of them Europeans, particularly Germans. It is known generically as “the Hamptons.” The political unit of which Claude and I are part is Southampton, but our village, again, an Indian name, is Sagaponack.

Even when I was in the first grade in school in Indianapolis, where there were no Indians, or so few that I never heard about them, I think I knew that Indians were innocent victims of crimes by white men that could never be forgiven by me, by anyone. Almost all of my schoolmates felt the same way, and our teachers did, too. It was so obvious, once we learned that Indians used to have their homes where we lived. If we kept a sharp lookout when we walked through woods or along riverbanks, we could actually find their arrowheads. I myself used to have a collection of maybe twenty or more of those. Why would anybody have departed voluntarily from a region so salubrious?

I apologize for writing as though the United States were the entire Western Hemisphere, and as though Claude were the only cat here, half-deaf or otherwise. But the first rule taught in any creative-writing course, and I think it’s a good one, is: “Write what you know about.”

The smallest state in Hughes’s Australia, the island of Tasmania, is the only place on Earth where the entire native population was dead soon after the first white people arrived, and whose genes are no longer to be found even in crossbreeds, since the settlers found Tasmanians so loathsome that they would not have sex with them. It is not certain that the Tasmanians had even domesticated fire. At the University of Chicago so long ago, one professor suggested to me that the Tasmanians found life so intolerable after the white people came that they stopped having sex with each other.

On this side of the water at least, TV, our great teacher, our endlessly diverting teacher, our only teacher, has had a lot to do with this change of heart, as well as with the elaborate preparations for suicide that preceded it. It has made all our enemies vanish into the black hole in its wake. It is as though they never existed. Until practically the day before yesterday, we were loved by only some countries. Now all countries love us, and we should feel like Marilyn Monroe standing over an air vent in the sidewalk, with her skirt blowing up around her ears, absolutely adorable!

My first wife, née Jane Marie Cox, now dead of cancer, was such an adept student of literature in college that she was nominated by the English Department for the highest honor, which was election to Phi Beta Kappa, a national society of our most diligent students. Her election was opposed by the History Department, whose wares she had denounced often and vocally as being as void of decency as child pornography. She was in good company of course, as I am able to demonstrate with the help of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations: “History is but the record of crimes and misfortunes,” Voltaire; “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” James Joyce; and on and on. Jane’s champions pointed this out to her enemies, and they prevailed. She became a Phi Beta Kappa.

We are incorrigibly the nastiest of all animals, as our history attests, and that is that.

The people who are called black here, and who call themselves black, are a small and easily defeatable minority, somewhere around ten or twelve percent of us. They have nonetheless made what is perhaps this hemisphere’s most consoling and harmlessly exciting contribution to world civilization: jazz. Second to that in making life a little better than it would be without it is, in my opinion, the therapeutic scheme for treating dangerous addictions, the invention by two white men in Akron, Ohio, of what are known as the Principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. Two other men from Ohio invented the flying machine. But I don’t believe we should be grateful to them. Such instruments have made smashing to smithereens the hopes of defenseless individuals, in Iraq, for example, even more of a lark than it was five hundred years ago.

As an anthropologist, supposedly, I might be expected to say a little something about the cultures that are vanishing along with the people. But hunger, it seems to me, becomes the whole of anybody’s culture before death sets in. As Bertolt Brecht said, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral,” or, freely translated, “As long as we’re hungry, all we can think about is food.”

As consolation, I offer this prayer attributed to the great German-American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), possibly as early as 1937, in the depths of the planetary economic depression before this one: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” - Sagaponack, 1992