Deadeye Dick

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.

He had curly golden hair, and he had lost almost none of it when his peephole closed, when he was allowed to stop being Otto Waltz, when he became just another wisp of undifferentiated nothingness again.

That is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

Midland City has now been depopulated by a neutron bomb explosion. It was a big news story for about ten days or so. It might have been a bigger story, a signal for the start of World War Three, if the Government hadn’t acknowledged at once that the bomb was made in America. One newscast I heard down here in Haiti called it “a friendly bomb.”

Imagine a language with only a present tense. Or imagine my father, who was wholly a creature of the past.

And I do not mean to mock him. He had been just another wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, like the rest of us, and then all the light and sound poured in.

She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there.

There was this: I was tall for my age. I was tall for any age, since the general population is well under six feet tall, and I was six feet tall.

“My boys will never have a shooting accident,” he said, “because their respect for weapons has become a part of their nervous systems.”

I hadn’t aimed at anything. If I thought of the bullet’s hitting anything, I don’t remember now. I was the great marksman, anyway. If I aimed at nothing, then nothing is what I would hit. The bullet was a symbol, and nobody was ever hurt by a symbol. It was a farewell to my childhood and a confirmation of my manhood. Why didn’t I use a blank cartridge? What kind of a symbol would that have been?

“My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die. “There is evil for you. “We cannot get rid of mankind’s fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true. “I give you a holy word: DISARM.”

It was a prewar Hudson. There weren’t any postwar cars yet.

I felt like a gas which had been confined in a labeled bottle for years, and which had now been released into the atmosphere.

“It’s a widely accepted principle,” he says, “that you can claim a piece of land which has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, if only you will repeat this mantra endlessly: ‘We discovered it, we discovered it, we discovered it….”’

I identified a basic mistake my parents had made about life: They thought that it would be very wrong if anybody ever laughed at them.

“Right. And the other one is a painting by somebody named Rabo Karabekian,”

The planet itself was breaking down. It was going to blow itself up sooner or later anyway, if it didn’t poison itself first. In a manner of speaking, it was already eating Drāno.

We all see our lives as stories, it seems to me, and I am convinced that psychologists and sociologists and historians and so on would find it useful to acknowledge that. If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.

“I’m so sorry they told the neighbors we had termites,” she said. “I wish they could have thought of something else. It’s like telling everybody we had leprosy.”

If she had died in childhood, she would have remembered life as the place you went, in case you wanted to see bugs eat a grand piano.

But the autopsy revealed that she had been healthy as a young horse, except for tumors in her head.

For a few moments there, I was happier than happy, healthier than healthy, and I saw these words scrawled on the tiles over a wash basin: “To be is to do”—Socrates. “To do is to be”—Jean-Paul Sartre. “Do be do be do”—Frank Sinatra.

For Mother to be personally radioactive, she would have had to bite a piece out of the mantelpiece, and then fail to excrete it. If she had done that, it’s true, she would have been a holy terror for twenty thousand years or more. But she didn’t.

“I’ll make a wild guess,” said the farmer, “and you’re going to laugh at it, because the people I’ll name want to be laughed at until it’s too late. They don’t want anybody worrying about whether they’re taking over the country from top to bottom—until it’s too late.” This was his wild guess: “The Ku Klux Klan.”

My own guess is that the American Government had to find out for certain whether the neutron bomb was as harmless as it was supposed to be. So it set one off in a small city which nobody cared about, where people weren’t doing all that much with their lives anyhow, where businesses were going under or moving away. The Government couldn’t test a bomb on a foreign city, after all, without running the risk of starting World War Three.

You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages—they haven’t ended yet.