Sucker's Portfolio

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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.

“What’s a youngster like you doing brooding about death, anyway? You’re good for another sixty years.” He colored, lay his hand on David’s shoulder. “Sorry — forgot.”

“What’s it like to be dead? In a word: dead. That’s what it’s like.” He put his stethoscope to the old man’s now-pounding heart. “What will our friend tell us?” He shook his head. “He’ll say what it’s customary to say. You’ve read it a hundred times in newspaper stories. The back-from-the-deaders don’t remember a thing, so ninety percent say the customary phrase just to be interesting.” He snapped his fingers. “And it’s so much bunk. Know the phrase I mean?” “No. Up to now I haven’t been interested.” Dr. Boyle fished a pencil stub and a scrap of paper from his vest pocket. He scrawled a sentence on the paper and handed it to David. “Here. Don’t look at it until our protégé comes around enough to talk. Five dollars says we’ll hear him say what I’ve just written.”

I like this doctor, betting on the undead

David reread the slip aloud: “My whole life passed before my eyes.”

Ain't nobody got time for that

“What did you see when you were dead?” David demanded. The farmer licked his lips, blinked. “My whole life — ” he began. “I know that. What I want to know is the details. Did you see people and places you’d forgotten all about?” The farmer closed his eyes, frowned in concentration. “I’m awful tired. I can’t think.” He stroked his temples. “It was quick, kind of like a movie going real fast, I guess — kind of flashes of old times.” “Did you get a good look at anything?” urged David tensely. “Please, can’t I go back to sleep?” “As soon as you answer me. Can you describe anything in detail?” The farmer licked his lips. “My mother and father — I saw them real good,” he said thickly.

If I say that a dead man is free to travel back to any instant in his own lifetime, then your logic can’t lay a finger on it. I don’t think he can change a thing about his lifetime, as you very logically point out. If he travels back, he can feel only what he felt then, do what he did then. I’m convinced that that much is possible.” “Who cares?” “I care,” said David evenly. “You care, everybody cares. If it’s true, this is a helluva sight more merciful life than it now appears to be.”

poor dead man

If I say that a dead man is free to travel back to any instant in his own lifetime, then your logic can’t lay a finger on it. I don’t think he can change a thing about his lifetime, as you very logically point out. If he travels back, he can feel only what he felt then, do what he did then. I’m convinced that that much is possible.” “Who cares?” “I care,” said David evenly. “You care, everybody cares. If it’s true, this is a helluva sight more merciful life than it now appears to be.”

or not so poor...

“And that experiment is — ?” David saw in Boyle’s reddening face that the doctor had guessed. An operation is what I want from you, Doctor. I’ll pay anything you like for it — plenty. I want to see about time for myself.” His voice was almost casual. He felt no awe for what he was asking for, felt only a longing for it. “I want you to kill me and bring me back to life.”

While I am curious I can wait

He didn’t need Boyle now. Not at first. He could manage the first part himself. Then the doctor would have to help. Ethically, he couldn’t refuse once the experiment was under way.

If it only it were that easy

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.

germs. The thing Bryce said he noticed about her was what he called her “purity.” He said that, up to the time he saw Melody, he hadn’t believed it was possible for a woman to be that pure. What John Sherwood said about her isn’t fit to print. What it boiled down to was that women that cold and that ignorant of the facts of life made him sick. The innocence of that girl was an unforgivable attack on all John held dear.

“There goes the reputation of every decent female cashier in the world,”

“My Daddy says kissing folks in public is the most disgusting thing there is.” The man who had told her that was under indictment for swindling his neighbors and his country out of six million dollars.

How we kept on or why we kept on I don’t know, but we did. That seems to be the basic rule in amateur theater — keep going, no matter what.

Sounds like a good rule for life

palaver

first time seeing this, might copy it.

“Don’t ask me to explain,” he tells her. “One doesn’t have to explain one’s actions in dreams.” He pauses. “In wars.” He pauses again. “In life.” Ulm has him pause again. “In love,” he says,

“In order for ‘Rome’ to come alive, Bella’s soul, as sensed by the audience, must be a dazzling kaleidoscope — a kaleidoscope reflected smokily in a mirror in Hell. If Bella leaves out one band of color in the full spectrum of what it means to be a destitute, rootless young woman in a country torn by war, then ‘Rome’ will fail.” I mentioned Ulm’s forward to Sally, asked her if Melody knew what a kaleidoscope was. “Yes,” said Sally. “She also knows what a spectrum is. What she doesn’t know is what a woman is.” “You mean what a woman sometimes has to be,” I said. “Suit yourself,” said Sally.

have like

been?

The boy was walking with the girl again. And this time she was on his arm. His heart was beating like a fire alarm. He was ready to talk now, to tell her how he loved her. The words were ready, bursting his soul. But her hand was cold, and her arm was as still as dry sticks. Her face was frozen in a smile that had nothing to do with him. He was too late. He had missed his chance when they were in Eden by the river. He was alone, all alone. He left her and sat down. His mind was blank, sensitive only to masses of sound and color. “Who gives this woman in marriage?” said the minister. The boy stood. “I — her brother — do,” he said.

Not what I expected...

Everybody has the itch to buy what I sell, because what I sell is advice on how to get richer, probably,

But, good as my advice is, not everybody can be a customer, because not everybody has venture capital — money for the stock market and me.

More people have venture capital than are talking about it, and it’s my job, if I care to go on eating, to discover these close-mouthed ones, and convince them that they would be shrewd to accept my help.

lackadaisical

Lackadaisical

Eddie was twenty-six. He had strong feelings about beautiful women. He hated and feared them.

She stuck him for $200 a month in alimony.

Could have been worse

“You are to be heartily congratulated,” Eddie said to her when news of the honor came. “Unfortunately,” he said, “our main business here is not sitting around and looking beautiful but manufacturing insulators. So let’s get back to work now, shall we?”

“I was fool enough to think she was as good as she looked,” he said. “It was a pretty grim mistake.”

“If she was so terrible to you, why do you keep her picture?” she said. “It’s like a man who’s been shot wanting the bullet for a souvenir,” he said.

“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.”

“You got so much more out of those Victrola records than I thought you did,” she said, talking about the records from which they’d tried to learn French. “Didn’t learn a damn thing from those records,” said Futz. “Any language is just noises people make with their mouths. Somebody makes a noise at me, and I make a noise back at him.” “Nobody understood the noises I made the whole time,” said Marie. “That’s because you weren’t really talking about anything,” said Futz.

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.

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.

Perhaps we are so fond of instant discoveries that I have to say didactically that St. Paul and Newton and Darwin, like Columbus, had long pondered whatever puzzle it was that they eventually solved, or seemed to solve, and that they had plenty of similarly inspired company while trying to solve it.

“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.

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.

Kirkpatrick Sale tells of Taino Indians who buried Christian icons in their fields in order to increase the fields’ fertility. This was a reverent thing for them to do, but Columbus’s brother Bartolomé had the Indians burned alive. On several occasions the Spaniards hanged thirteen Indians at once, with their feet barely touching the ground, in honor of Jesus and the twelve Apostles. And of course the Christian Adolf Hitler back in the Old World, not that long ago, had the men who had conspired to assassinate him hanged from meat hooks by piano wire, with their feet barely touching the ground, and had their comical jigs of death filmed by a professional camera crew.

fact check please... don't doubt it though

I am out here in the wintertime, with all the rich people generating garbage in Palm Beach and Monte Carlo and so on, because of certain problems with my marriage, which my wife and I hope are only temporary. I think she is Columbus and I am the Indians, and she thinks I am Columbus and she is the Indians. But we are calming down.

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.”

Contrast, if you will, all that celibacy in the Tasman Sea with this uninhibited frolic in 1493, in the Caribbean: “While I was in the boat I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me…I conceived desire to take pleasure…but she did not want it and treated me with her fingernails in such a manner that I wished I had never begun. But…I took a rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised such unheard of screams that you would not have believed your ears. Finally we came to an agreement in such a manner that I can tell you that she seemed to have been brought up in a school of harlots.” That is an account by an Italian nobleman, and I have lifted it from Sale’s book. The Lord Admiral, of course, was Columbus. And one is surely not reminded of Hitler, whom Sale mentions nowhere, since Hitler was virtually as celibate as the last Tasmanian, sexually beyond reproach.

?

During the Second World War it was generally believed by Hitler’s enemies that he had only one testicle. I confess that I believed it. We will never know, I suppose, who started that rumor. But Russians who took possession of Hitler’s charred remains in Berlin counted his testicles, and he had two of them. It is also not true that the Nazis made soap and candles of fat rendered from the corpses of concentration-camp victims. I myself helped to spread that story in a novel, Mother Night, and have received enough letters from dispassionate fact-gatherers to persuade me that I had been misleading. Mea culpa.

hmm...

Twain’s was about etiquette. His advice on how to behave at a funeral, I remember, included, “Do not bring your dog.”

racks on the playground.