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I woke up, feeling like something had crawled into my mouth and died sometime during the night. It was no relief to find out it was tongue. Did I say night? Early morning looked more plausible, the light seemed to be coming from all directions, giving me a splitting headache.
Worse, this wasn't even my flat. My heart sunk as I realized I had spent another booze-induced sleep session at the office. Clearing the sleep from my eyes, I managed to sit up straight, feeling the stiffness in my back. I put the lid on the cheap scotch from last night – Glenmorangie – and finished the half empty glass.
It burned as it went down, but I was feeling more alert, more alive. I rocked back on my chair, and looked out the window. Another soulless day, the too bright sun shining off the reflective, all too familiar buildings.
Oh how I hated it here.
I put my feet up on the desk, pulled my fedora over my eyes, and made myself at home with the silence. It was relaxing, and peaceful. In my office with no work to do, no pressing engagements and half a bottle of low quality single malt to get me through the afternoon.
And then she walked in. Rolling off the streets like some primeval force, a whirlwind of passion and destruction.
“I'm sorry”, I said, “I think you have the wrong room. The drag queen's make up class is three doors down.” It was, too. This was a cheap neighbourhood, and you took office space where you could afford it.
“I'm NOT a drag queen! And anyone who says otherwise, or edits my Wikipedia to say so is nothing more than a filthy and childish liar!”
An American. And either in hysterics or denial, possibly both. This wasn't going to end well, I could tell.
“I'm sorry....ma'am” I answered, cautiously. This met with no outburst, so I continued on, “what can I do for you this, uh, fine day?”
“Are you Cain?” she asked.
I looked around discreetly for any recording devices or other listeners. I saw none.
“Yes”, I replied, in a bored, drawn out yawn. “What's it to you?”
“I hear you're a dick. I need someone to be a dick for me.”
I thought about this momentarily. Her jaw looked like it could crack open a man's skull, and there was something disconcerting about that Adam's Apple...
“I assume you mean a Private Detective, of course. Then you have come to the right place. What exactly can I do for you? In a professional capacity, of course.”
She withdrew a sheet from her handbag, and placed it on my desk. Swinging my legs down, I grabbed the paper and had a look. It was a printout, of a Wikipedia edit history page. Some numbers were circled, and highlighted with a marker pen.
“My name is Amy Alkon, Cain”, she said, “and I need you to find a man for me. I need you track down and bring me Gary Ruppert.”
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Aug 18, 2008
Jul 11, 2008
Neal Stephenson on literary genres
An interesting 40 minute talk about the breakdown of traditional genres in fiction and literature.
Link via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.
Jun 28, 2008
YES! Hillary/Obama fanfiction!
Fuck you, I'm sick and this appeals to my sense of humour:
“Hillary,” she heard from behind her. It was Obama.
She stiffened with jealousy. Lucky him, able to wear a suit. Oh, how she envied him, for his popularity and the fact that he was a man.
“Yes, Mr. Obama?” She answered, stifling her anger.
“Hillary, you can call me Barack.”
She turned around and forced one of her fake smiles. “And why would I want to do that?”
He sighed and tossed his head. “Why are you always like this, Hillary? I was going to congratulate you on the debate, but you . . . you always pull this sarcastic attitude on me.”
She gave up on the fakeness, then. “I don’t know. Why are you always so sweet? When you’re out there, heck, when you’re in here, you always make it seem like we’re friends or something.”
“Aren’t we?”
“No, Barack, and I don’t see why you can’t understand that,” she said. She didn’t feel like this right now. She felt like kicking off her shoes and passing out. It was ridiculous.
He was silent. He stared at her. “If I get nominated, do you want to be my vice president?”
It was a nice thing for him to say, but she sighed instead of thanking him. “What, did you and Bill Richardson get in a fight or something?”
“What?”
“Wasn’t he going to be your vice?”
“No. Why would I want that goofy New Mexican?” He smiled.
She smiled, too. The thing about Barack was that he was hard to hate for a long time. “I suppose so, if you’d really like that.”
“I would,” he said. “There’s something else I’ve been meaning to tell you, also, Hillary.”
“What’s that?” she headed for her dressing room, and gestured for him to follow.
He followed. “Well, um, I know that we don’t always get along, but, um . . . ” he stuttered ungracefully.
She narrowed her eyes. She knew that Barack could be a sneaky, sneaky guy, and it was hard to tell if he was acting. Why on earth would such a wonderful speaker like him feel the need to hesitate? “Yes?” she pried, opening the door to her dressing room.
“I...never mind.”
“No, I want to know now.”
He sat down on the couch in her dressing room. “I feel like it would hinder what little relationship we have.”
She sat in the chair across from him and started taking off her makeup. “I doubt something you would say would make that happen.”
He sighed. But then, instead of speaking, he stood, and in a swift movement, he was standing behind her. “Hillary, I don’t know how to tell you . . . ” his hands moved to her shoulders.
She stiffened at his touch. His hands were so strong yet gentle, just like his words. Could it be . . . ? “Tell me what, Barack?” she nearly whispered.
“We’ve . . . even though we’re opponents, I feel like I’ve never been closer to anyone in my life,” he said.
“Nor have I,” she agreed.
His hands gently squeezed her shoulders. It was enough to drive her mad.
She quickly turned around and stood up, knocking his hands away. “If you feel how I feel, Barack, just tell me, tell me!”
“I think I do,” he said. In moments, his hands were back, holding her arms like he’d never let go. “I’ve fallen for you quicker than the youth of America have fallen for my campaign.”
“Oh, Barack! Why?”
“I can’t say. Perhaps I have a thing for arrogant, white women.”
“Perhaps you do. Perhaps I have a thing for overly popular, half-black men.”
He grabbed her and kissed her like she’d never been kissed before.
Apr 18, 2008
You know its time to log off the internet when.... #1
Start of a brand new series which will just prove I really should log off more often.
You know its time to log off the internet when....
1) You have a dream in which Rick Astley personally rickrolls you, but then you wake up and feel depressed because nothing that cool will ever really happen.
2) You realize there is a market for War on Terror slashfic
You know its time to log off the internet when....
1) You have a dream in which Rick Astley personally rickrolls you, but then you wake up and feel depressed because nothing that cool will ever really happen.
2) You realize there is a market for War on Terror slashfic
Apr 13, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut: Me myself and I
One of America's best-loved novelists, Kurt Vonnegut, who died this week, was often asked to explain his craft and the events that inspired him. In this seminal conversation with 'The Paris Review', conducted over more than a decade and finally published in 1977, the writer offers a fascinating glimpse into his early life, shares his wicked sense of humour - and reveals the humanity that underpins his work
Published: 13 April 2007
INTERVIEWER You are a veteran of the Second World War?
KURT VONNEGUT, JR. Yes. I want a military funeral when I die - the bugler, the flag on the casket, the ceremonial firing squad, the hallowed ground.
INTERVIEWER Why?
VONNEGUT It will be a way of achieving what I've always wanted more than anything - something I could have had, if only I'd managed to get myself killed in the war.
INTERVIEWER Which is - ?
VONNEGUT The unqualified approval of my community.
INTERVIEWER You don't feel that you have that now?
VONNEGUT My relatives say that they are glad I'm rich, but that they simply cannot read me.
INTERVIEWER You were an infantry battalion scout in the war?
VONNEGUT Yes, but I took my basic training on the 240mm howitzer.
INTERVIEWER But you were ultimately sent overseas not with this instrument but with the 106th Infantry Division -
VONNEGUT "The Bag Lunch Division." They used to feed us a lot of bag lunches. Salami sandwiches. An orange.
INTERVIEWER In combat?
VONNEGUT When we were still in the States.
INTERVIEWER While they trained you for the infantry?
VONNEGUT I was never trained for the infantry. Battalion scouts were élite troops, see. There were only six in each battalion, and nobody was very sure about what they were supposed to do. So we would march over to the rec room every morning and play ping-pong and fill out applications for officer candidate school.
INTERVIEWER During your basic training, though, you must have been familiarised with weapons other than the howitzer.
VONNEGUT If you study the 240mm howitzer, you don't even have time left over for a venereal-disease film.
INTERVIEWER What happened when you reached the front?
VONNEGUT I imitated various war movies I'd seen.
INTERVIEWER Did you shoot anybody in the war?
VONNEGUT I thought about it. I did fix my bayonet once, fully expecting to charge.
INTERVIEWER Did you charge?
VONNEGUT No. If everybody else had charged, I would have charged, too. But we decided not to charge. We couldn't see anybody.
INTERVIEWER Do you mind describing your capture by the Germans?
VONNEGUT Gladly. We were in this gully about as deep as a First World War trench. There was snow all around. Somebody said we were probably in Luxembourg. We were out of food. The Germans could see us, because they were talking to us through a loudspeaker. They told us our situation was hopeless, and so on. That was when we fixed bayonets. It was nice there for a few minutes.
INTERVIEWER What did the Germans say?
VONNEGUT They said the war was all over for us, that we were lucky, that we could now be sure we would live through the war, which was more than they could be sure of. As a matter of fact, they were probably killed or captured by Patton's Third Army within the next few days. Wheels within wheels.
INTERVIEWER Did you speak any German?
VONNEGUT I had heard my parents speak it a lot. They hadn't taught me how to do it, since there had been such bitterness in America against all things German during the First World War. I tried a few words I knew on our captors, and they asked me if I was of German ancestry, and I said, "Yes." They wanted to know why I was making war against my brothers.
INTERVIEWER And you said - ?
VONNEGUT I honestly found the question ignorant and comical. My parents had separated me so thoroughly from my Germanic past that my captors might as well have been Bolivians or Tibetans, for all they meant to me.
INTERVIEWER And you finally arrived in Dresden.
VONNEGUT In a huge prison camp south of Dresden first. The privates were separated from the non-coms and officers. Under the articles of the Geneva Convention, which is a very Edwardian document, privates were required to work for their keep. Everybody else got to languish in prison. As a private, I was shipped to Dresden...
INTERVIEWER What were your impressions of the city itself before the bombing?
VONNEGUT The first fancy city I'd ever seen. A city full of statues and zoos, like Paris. We were living in a slaughterhouse, in a nice new cement-block hog barn. They put bunks and straw mattresses in the barn, and we went to work every morning as contract labour in a malt-syrup factory. The syrup was for pregnant women. The damned sirens would go off and we'd hear some other city getting it - whump a whump a whump a whump. We never expected to get it. There were very few air-raid shelters in town and no war industries, just cigarette factories, hospitals, clarinet factories. Then a siren went off - it was February 13 1945 - and we went down two stories under the pavement into a big meat locker. It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around. When we came up the city was gone.
INTERVIEWER You didn't suffocate in the meat locker?
VONNEGUT
No. It was quite large, and there weren't very many of us. The attack didn't sound like a hell of a lot either. Whump. They went over with high explosives first to loosen things up, and then scattered incendiaries. When the war started, incendiaries were fairly sizeable, about as long as a shoebox. By the time Dresden got it, they were tiny little things. They burnt the whole damn town down.
INTERVIEWER What an impression on someone thinking of becoming a writer!
VONNEGUT It was a fancy thing to see, a startling thing. It was a moment of truth, too, because American civilians and ground troops didn't know American bombers were engaged in saturation bombing. It was kept a secret until very close to the end of the war.
INTERVIEWER Did you intend to write about it as soon as you went through the experience?
VONNEGUT When the city was demolished I had no idea of the scale of the thing... Whether this was what Bremen looked like or Hamburg, Coventry... I'd never seen Coventry, so I had no scale except for what I'd seen in movies. When I got home (I was a writer since I had been on the Cornell Sun, except that was the extent of my writing) I thought of writing my war story, too. All my friends were home; they'd had wonderful adventures, too. I went down to the newspaper office, the Indianapolis News, and looked to find out what they had about Dresden. There was an item about half an inch long, which said our planes had been over Dresden and two had been lost. And so I figured, well, this really was the most minor sort of detail in World War II. Others had so much more to write about. I remember envying Andy Rooney, who jumped into print at that time; I didn't know him, but I think he was the first guy to publish his war story after the war; it was called Air Gunner. Hell, I never had any classy adventure like that. But every so often I would meet a European and we would be talking about the war and I would say I was in Dresden; he'd be astonished that I'd been there, and he'd always want to know more. Then a book by David Irving was published about Dresden, saying it was the largest massacre in European history. I said, "By God, I saw something after all!" I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it.
INTERVIEWER One more war question: Do you still think about the firebombing of Dresden at all?
VONNEGUT I wrote a book about it, called Slaughterhouse-Five. The book is still in print, and I have to do something about it as a businessman now and then.
INTERVIEWER Which member of your family had the most influence on you as a writer?
VONNEGUT My mother, I guess. Edith Lieber Vonnegut. After our family lost almost all of its money in the Great Depression, my mother thought she might make a new fortune by writing for the slick magazines. She took short-story courses at night. She studied magazines the way gamblers study racing forms.
INTERVIEWER She'd been rich at one time?
VONNEGUT My father, an architect of modest means, married one of the richest girls in town. It was a brewing fortune based on Lieber Lager Beer and then Gold Medal Beer. Lieber Lager became Gold Medal after winning a prize at some Paris exposition.
INTERVIEWER It must have been a very good beer.
VONNEGUT Long before my time. I never tasted any. It had a secret ingredient, I know. My grandfather and his brewmaster wouldn't let anybody watch while they put it in.
INTERVIEWER Do you know what it was?
VONNEGUT Coffee.
INTERVIEWER So your mother studied short-story writing -
VONNEGUT And my father painted pictures in a studio he'd set up on the top floor of the house. There wasn't much work for architects during the Great Depression - not much work for anybody. Strangely enough, though, Mother was right: even mediocre magazine writers were making money hand over fist.
INTERVIEWER So your mother took a very practical attitude toward writing.
VONNEGUT Not to say crass. She was a highly intelligent, cultivated woman, by the way. She went to the same high school I did, and was one of the few people who got nothing but A-pluses while she was there. She went east to a finishing school after that, and then traveled all over Europe. She was fluent in German and French. I still have her high-school report cards somewhere. A-plus, A-plus, A-plus... She was a good writer, it turned out, but she had no talent for the vulgarity the slick magazines required. Fortunately, I was loaded with vulgarity, so when I grew up I was able to make her dream come true. Writing for Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan and Ladies' Home Journal and so on was as easy as falling off a log for me. I only wish she'd lived to see it. I only wish she'd lived to see all her grandchildren. She has 10. She didn't even get to see the first one. I made another one of her dreams come true: I lived on Cape Cod for many years. She always wanted to live on Cape Cod. It's probably very common for sons to try to make their mothers' impossible dreams come true. I adopted my sister's sons after she died, and it's spooky to watch them try to make her impossible dreams come true.
INTERVIEWER What were your sister's dreams like?
VONNEGUT She wanted to live like a member of The Swiss Family Robinson, with impossibly friendly animals in impossibly congenial isolation. Her oldest son, Jim, has been a goat farmer on a mountaintop in Jamaica for the past eight years. No telephone. No electricity.
INTERVIEWER The Indianapolis high school you and your mother attended -
VONNEGUT And my father. Shortridge High.
INTERVIEWER It had a daily paper, I believe.
VONNEGUT Yes. The Shortridge Daily Echo. There was a print shop right in the school. Students wrote the paper. Students set the type. I've always found it easy to write. Also, I learned to write for peers rather than for teachers. Most beginning writers don't get to write for peers - to catch hell from peers.
INTERVIEWER So every afternoon you would go to the Echo office -
VONNEGUT Yeah. And one time, while I was writing, I happened to sniff my armpits absentmindedly. Several people saw me do it, and thought it was funny - and ever after that I was given the name "Snarf". In the annual for my graduating class, the class of 1940, I'm listed as "Kurt Snarfield Vonnegut, Jr." Technically, I wasn't really a snarf. A snarf was a person who went around sniffing girls' bicycle saddles. I didn't do that. Twerp also had a very specific meaning, which few people know now. Through careless usage, twerp is a pretty formless insult now.
INTERVIEWER What is a twerp in the strictest sense, in the original sense?
VONNEGUT It's a person who inserts a set of false teeth between the cheeks of his ass.
INTERVIEWER I see.
VONNEGUT I beg your pardon; between the cheeks of his or her ass. I'm always offending feminists that way.
INTERVIEWER I don't quite understand why someone would do that with false teeth.
VONNEGUT In order to bite the buttons off the backseats of taxicabs. That's the only reason twerps do it. It's all that turns them on.
INTERVIEWER You went to Cornell University after Shortridge?
VONNEGUT I imagine.
INTERVIEWER You imagine?
VONNEGUT I had a friend who was a heavy drinker. If somebody asked him if he'd been drunk the night before, he would always answer offhandedly, "Oh, I imagine." I've always liked that answer. It acknowledges life as a dream. Cornell was a boozy dream, partly because of booze itself, and partly because I was enrolled exclusively in courses I had no talent for. My father and brother agreed that I should study chemistry, since my brother had done so well with chemicals at MIT. He's eight years older than I am. Funnier, too. His most famous discovery is that silver iodide will sometimes make it rain or snow.
INTERVIEWER Was your sister funny, too?
VONNEGUT Oh, yes. There was an odd cruel streak to her sense of humour, though, which didn't fit in with the rest of her character somehow. She thought it was terribly funny whenever anybody fell down. One time she saw a woman come out of a streetcar horizontally, and she laughed for weeks after that. We loved Laurel and Hardy. You know what one of the funniest things is that can happen in a film?
INTERVIEWER No.
VONNEGUT To have somebody walk through what looks like a shallow little puddle, but which is actually six feet deep.
INTERVIEWER Did you take a degree in chemistry at Cornell?
VONNEGUT I was flunking everything by the middle of my junior year. I was delighted to join the army and go to war. After the war, I went to the University of Chicago, where I was pleased to study anthropology, a science that was mostly poetry, that involved almost no math at all. I was married by then, and soon had one kid, who was Mark. He would later go crazy, of course, and write a fine book about it - The Eden Express. He has just fathered a kid himself, my first grandchild, a boy named Zachary. Mark is finishing second year in Harvard Medical School, and will be about the only member of his class not to be in debt when he graduates - because of the book. That's a pretty decent recovery from a crack-up, I'd say.
INTERVIEWER What was your dissertation?
VONNEGUT Cat's Cradle.
INTERVIEWER But you wrote that years after you left Chicago, didn't you?
VONNEGUT I left Chicago without writing a dissertation - and without a degree. All my ideas for dissertations had been rejected, and I was broke, so I took a job as a PR man for General Electric in Schenectady. Twenty years later, I got a letter from a new dean at Chicago, who had been looking through my dossier. Under the rules of the university, he said, a published work of high quality could be substituted for a dissertation, so I was entitled to an MA. He had shown Cat's Cradle to the anthropology department, and they had said it was halfway decent anthropology, so they were mailing me my degree. I'm class of 1972 or so.
INTERVIEWER Congratulations.
VONNEGUT It was nothing, really. A piece of cake.
INTERVIEWER Let's talk about the women in your books.
VONNEGUT There aren't any. No real women, no love.
INTERVIEWER Is this worth expounding upon?
VONNEGUT It's a mechanical problem. So much of what happens in storytelling is mechanical, has to do with the technical problems of how to make a story work. Cowboy stories and policeman stories end in shoot-outs, for example, because shoot-outs are the most reliable mechanisms for making such stories end. There is nothing like death to say what is always such an artificial thing to say: The End. I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don't want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that's the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.
INTERVIEWER So you keep love out.
VONNEGUT I have other things I want to talk about.
INTERVIEWER Not many writers talk about the mechanics of stories.
VONNEGUT I am such a barbarous technocrat that I believe they can be tinkered with like Model T Fords.
INTERVIEWER To what end?
VONNEGUT To give the reader pleasure.
INTERVIEWER When I asked you a while back which member of your family had influenced you most as a writer, you said your mother. I had expected you to say your sister, since you talked so much about her in Slapstick.
VONNEGUT I said in Slapstick that she was the person I wrote for - that every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind. That's the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind. I didn't realise that she was the person I wrote for until after she died.
INTERVIEWER She loved literature?
VONNEGUT She wrote wonderfully well. She didn't read much - but then again, neither in later years did Henry David Thoreau. My father was the same way: he didn't read much, but he could write like a dream. Such letters my father and sister wrote! When I compare their prose with mine, I am ashamed. She could have been a remarkable sculptor, too. I bawled her out one time for not doing more with the talents she had. She replied that having talent doesn't carry with it the obligation that something has to be done with it. This was startling news to me. I thought people were supposed to grab their talents and run as far and fast as they could.
INTERVIEWER What do you think now?
VONNEGUT Well - what my sister said now seems a peculiarly feminine sort of wisdom. I have two daughters who are as talented as she was, and both of them are damned if they are going to lose their poise and senses of humour by snatching up their talents and desperately running as far and as fast as they can. They saw me run as far and as fast as I could - and it must have looked like quite a crazy performance to them. And this is the worst possible metaphor, for what they actually saw was a man sitting still for decades.
INTERVIEWER At a typewriter.
VONNEGUT Yes, and smoking his fool head off.
INTERVIEWER Have you ever stopped smoking?
VONNEGUT Twice. Once I did it cold turkey, and turned into Santa Claus. I became roly-poly. I was approaching 250lb. I stopped for almost a year, and then the University of Hawaii brought me to Oahu to speak. I was drinking out of a coconut on the roof of the Ili Kai one night, and all I had to do to complete the ring of my happiness was to smoke a cigarette. Which I did.
INTERVIEWER The second time?
VONNEGUT Very recently - last year. I paid Smokenders $150 to help me quit, over a period of six weeks. It was exactly as they had promised - easy and instructive. I won my graduation certificate and recognition pin. The only trouble was that I had also gone insane. I was supremely happy and proud, but those around me found me unbearably opinionated and abrupt and boisterous. Also: I had stopped writing. I didn't even write letters anymore. I had made a bad trade, evidently. So I started smoking again. As the National Association of Manufacturers used to say, There's no such thing as a free lunch.
INTERVIEWER Do you really think creative writing can be taught?
VONNEGUT About the same way golf can be taught. A pro can point out obvious flaws in your swing. I did that well, I think, at the University of Iowa for two years. Gail Godwin and John Irving and Jonathan Penner and Bruce Dobler and John Casey and Jane Casey were all students of mine out there. They've all published wonderful stuff since then. I taught creative writing badly at Harvard - because my marriage was breaking up, and because I was commuting every week to Cambridge from New York. I taught even worse at City College a couple of years ago. I had too many other projects going on at the same time. I don't have the will to teach anymore. I only know the theory.
INTERVIEWER You have been a public relations man and an advertising man -
VONNEGUT Oh, I imagine.
INTERVIEWER Was this painful? I mean - did you feel your talent was being wasted, being crippled?
VONNEGUT No. That's romance - that work of that sort damages a writer's soul. At Iowa, Dick Yates and I used to give a lecture each year on the writer and the free-enterprise system. The students hated it. We would talk about all the hack jobs writers could take in case they found themselves starving to death, or in case they wanted to accumulate enough capital to finance the writing of a book. Since publishers aren't putting money into first novels anymore, and since the magazines have died, and since television isn't buying from young freelancers anymore, and since the foundations give grants only to old poops like me, young writers are going to have to support themselves as shameless hacks. Otherwise, we are soon going to find ourselves without a contemporary literature. There is only one genuinely ghastly thing hack jobs do to writers, and that is to waste their precious time.
INTERVIEWER No joke.
VONNEGUT A tragedy. I just keep trying to think of ways, even horrible ways, for young writers to somehow hang on.
INTERVIEWER Should young writers be subsidised?
VONNEGUT
Something's got to be done, now that free enterprise has made it impossible for them to support themselves through free enterprise. I was a sensational businessman in the beginning - for the simple reason that there was so much business to be done. When I was working for General Electric, I wrote a story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect", the first story I ever wrote. I mailed it off to Collier's. Knox Burger was fiction editor there. Knox told me what was wrong with it and how to fix it. I did what he said, and he bought the story for $750, six weeks' pay at GE. I wrote another, and he paid me $950, and suggested that it was perhaps time for me to quit GE. Which I did. I moved to Provincetown. Eventually, my price for a short story got up to $2,900 a crack. Think of that. And Knox got me a couple of agents who were as shrewd about storytelling as he was - Kenneth Littauer, who had been his predecessor at Collier's, and Max Wilkinson, who had been a story editor for MGM. And let it be put on the record here that Knox Burger, who is about my age, discovered and encouraged more good young writers than any other editor of his time. I don't think that's ever been written down anywhere. It's a fact known only to writers, and one that could easily vanish, if it isn't somewhere written down.
INTERVIEWER Do you have a new mentor now?
VONNEGUT No. I guess I'm too old to find one. What ever I write now is set in type without comment by my publisher, who is younger than I am, by editors, by anyone. I don't have my sister to write for anymore. Suddenly, there are all these unfilled jobs in my life.
INTERVIEWER Do you feel as though you're up there without a net under you?
VONNEGUT And without a balancing pole, either. It gives me the heebie-jeebies sometimes.
INTERVIEWER Is there anything else you'd like to add?
VONNEGUT I want to say, too, that humourists are very commonly the youngest children in their families. When I was the littlest kid at our supper table, there was only one way I could get anybody's attention, and that was to be funny. I had to specialise. I used to listen to radio comedians very intently, so I could learn how to make jokes. And that's what my books are, now that I'm a grownup - mosaics of jokes.
INTERVIEWER Do you have any favourite jokes?
VONNEGUT Well - you won't laugh. Nobody ever laughs. But one is an old Two Black Crows joke. The Two Black Crows were white guys in blackface - named Moran and Mack. They made phonograph records of their routines, two supposedly black guys talking lazily to each other. Anyway, one of them says, "Last night I dreamed I was eating flannel cakes." The other one says, "Is that so?" And the first one says, "And when I woke up, the blanket was gone."
INTERVIEWER Um.
VONNEGUT I told you you wouldn't laugh. The other champion joke requires your cooperation. I will ask you a question, and you have to say "No."
INTERVIEWER OK.
VONNEGUT Do you know why cream is so much more expensive than milk?
INTERVIEWER No.
VONNEGUT Because the cows hate to squat on those little bottles. See, you didn't laugh again, but I give you my sacred word of honour that those are splendid jokes. Exquisite craftsmanship.
INTERVIEWER If your parents hadn't lost all their money, what would you be doing now?
VONNEGUT I'd be an Indianapolis architect - like my father and grandfather. And very happy, too. I still wish that had happened. One thing, anyway: one of the best young architects out there lives in a house my father built for our family the year I was born - 1922. My initials, and my sister's initials, and my brother's initials are all written in leaded glass in the three little windows by the front door.
INTERVIEWER So you have good old days you hanker for.
VONNEGUT Yes. Whenever I go to Indianapolis, the same question asks itself over and over again in my head: where's my bed, where's my bed? And if my father's and grandfather's ghosts haunt that town, they must be wondering where all their buildings have gone to. The centre of the city, where most of their buildings were, has been turned into parking lots. They must be wondering where all their relatives went, too. They grew up in a huge extended family which is no more. I got the slightest taste of that big family thing. And when I went to the University of Chicago, and I heard the head of the Department of Anthropology, Robert Redfield, lecture on the folk society, which was essentially a stable, isolated extended family, he did not have to tell me how nice that could be.
INTERVIEWER Anything else?
VONNEGUT Perhaps we should say something at this point how this interview itself was done - unless candour would somehow spoil everything.
INTERVIEWER Let the chips fall where they may.
VONNEGUT Four different interviews with me were submitted to The Paris Review. These were patched together to form a single interview, which was shown to me. This scheme worked only fairly well, so I called in yet another interviewer to make it all of a piece. I was that person. With utmost tenderness, I interviewed myself.
INTERVIEWER I see. Our last question. If you were Commissar of Publishing in the United States, what would you do to alleviate the present deplorable situation?
VONNEGUT There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers.
INTERVIEWER So - ?
VONNEGUT I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.
INTERVIEWER Thank you.
VONNEGUT Thank you.
Published: 13 April 2007
INTERVIEWER You are a veteran of the Second World War?
KURT VONNEGUT, JR. Yes. I want a military funeral when I die - the bugler, the flag on the casket, the ceremonial firing squad, the hallowed ground.
INTERVIEWER Why?
VONNEGUT It will be a way of achieving what I've always wanted more than anything - something I could have had, if only I'd managed to get myself killed in the war.
INTERVIEWER Which is - ?
VONNEGUT The unqualified approval of my community.
INTERVIEWER You don't feel that you have that now?
VONNEGUT My relatives say that they are glad I'm rich, but that they simply cannot read me.
INTERVIEWER You were an infantry battalion scout in the war?
VONNEGUT Yes, but I took my basic training on the 240mm howitzer.
INTERVIEWER But you were ultimately sent overseas not with this instrument but with the 106th Infantry Division -
VONNEGUT "The Bag Lunch Division." They used to feed us a lot of bag lunches. Salami sandwiches. An orange.
INTERVIEWER In combat?
VONNEGUT When we were still in the States.
INTERVIEWER While they trained you for the infantry?
VONNEGUT I was never trained for the infantry. Battalion scouts were élite troops, see. There were only six in each battalion, and nobody was very sure about what they were supposed to do. So we would march over to the rec room every morning and play ping-pong and fill out applications for officer candidate school.
INTERVIEWER During your basic training, though, you must have been familiarised with weapons other than the howitzer.
VONNEGUT If you study the 240mm howitzer, you don't even have time left over for a venereal-disease film.
INTERVIEWER What happened when you reached the front?
VONNEGUT I imitated various war movies I'd seen.
INTERVIEWER Did you shoot anybody in the war?
VONNEGUT I thought about it. I did fix my bayonet once, fully expecting to charge.
INTERVIEWER Did you charge?
VONNEGUT No. If everybody else had charged, I would have charged, too. But we decided not to charge. We couldn't see anybody.
INTERVIEWER Do you mind describing your capture by the Germans?
VONNEGUT Gladly. We were in this gully about as deep as a First World War trench. There was snow all around. Somebody said we were probably in Luxembourg. We were out of food. The Germans could see us, because they were talking to us through a loudspeaker. They told us our situation was hopeless, and so on. That was when we fixed bayonets. It was nice there for a few minutes.
INTERVIEWER What did the Germans say?
VONNEGUT They said the war was all over for us, that we were lucky, that we could now be sure we would live through the war, which was more than they could be sure of. As a matter of fact, they were probably killed or captured by Patton's Third Army within the next few days. Wheels within wheels.
INTERVIEWER Did you speak any German?
VONNEGUT I had heard my parents speak it a lot. They hadn't taught me how to do it, since there had been such bitterness in America against all things German during the First World War. I tried a few words I knew on our captors, and they asked me if I was of German ancestry, and I said, "Yes." They wanted to know why I was making war against my brothers.
INTERVIEWER And you said - ?
VONNEGUT I honestly found the question ignorant and comical. My parents had separated me so thoroughly from my Germanic past that my captors might as well have been Bolivians or Tibetans, for all they meant to me.
INTERVIEWER And you finally arrived in Dresden.
VONNEGUT In a huge prison camp south of Dresden first. The privates were separated from the non-coms and officers. Under the articles of the Geneva Convention, which is a very Edwardian document, privates were required to work for their keep. Everybody else got to languish in prison. As a private, I was shipped to Dresden...
INTERVIEWER What were your impressions of the city itself before the bombing?
VONNEGUT The first fancy city I'd ever seen. A city full of statues and zoos, like Paris. We were living in a slaughterhouse, in a nice new cement-block hog barn. They put bunks and straw mattresses in the barn, and we went to work every morning as contract labour in a malt-syrup factory. The syrup was for pregnant women. The damned sirens would go off and we'd hear some other city getting it - whump a whump a whump a whump. We never expected to get it. There were very few air-raid shelters in town and no war industries, just cigarette factories, hospitals, clarinet factories. Then a siren went off - it was February 13 1945 - and we went down two stories under the pavement into a big meat locker. It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around. When we came up the city was gone.
INTERVIEWER You didn't suffocate in the meat locker?
VONNEGUT
No. It was quite large, and there weren't very many of us. The attack didn't sound like a hell of a lot either. Whump. They went over with high explosives first to loosen things up, and then scattered incendiaries. When the war started, incendiaries were fairly sizeable, about as long as a shoebox. By the time Dresden got it, they were tiny little things. They burnt the whole damn town down.
INTERVIEWER What an impression on someone thinking of becoming a writer!
VONNEGUT It was a fancy thing to see, a startling thing. It was a moment of truth, too, because American civilians and ground troops didn't know American bombers were engaged in saturation bombing. It was kept a secret until very close to the end of the war.
INTERVIEWER Did you intend to write about it as soon as you went through the experience?
VONNEGUT When the city was demolished I had no idea of the scale of the thing... Whether this was what Bremen looked like or Hamburg, Coventry... I'd never seen Coventry, so I had no scale except for what I'd seen in movies. When I got home (I was a writer since I had been on the Cornell Sun, except that was the extent of my writing) I thought of writing my war story, too. All my friends were home; they'd had wonderful adventures, too. I went down to the newspaper office, the Indianapolis News, and looked to find out what they had about Dresden. There was an item about half an inch long, which said our planes had been over Dresden and two had been lost. And so I figured, well, this really was the most minor sort of detail in World War II. Others had so much more to write about. I remember envying Andy Rooney, who jumped into print at that time; I didn't know him, but I think he was the first guy to publish his war story after the war; it was called Air Gunner. Hell, I never had any classy adventure like that. But every so often I would meet a European and we would be talking about the war and I would say I was in Dresden; he'd be astonished that I'd been there, and he'd always want to know more. Then a book by David Irving was published about Dresden, saying it was the largest massacre in European history. I said, "By God, I saw something after all!" I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it.
INTERVIEWER One more war question: Do you still think about the firebombing of Dresden at all?
VONNEGUT I wrote a book about it, called Slaughterhouse-Five. The book is still in print, and I have to do something about it as a businessman now and then.
INTERVIEWER Which member of your family had the most influence on you as a writer?
VONNEGUT My mother, I guess. Edith Lieber Vonnegut. After our family lost almost all of its money in the Great Depression, my mother thought she might make a new fortune by writing for the slick magazines. She took short-story courses at night. She studied magazines the way gamblers study racing forms.
INTERVIEWER She'd been rich at one time?
VONNEGUT My father, an architect of modest means, married one of the richest girls in town. It was a brewing fortune based on Lieber Lager Beer and then Gold Medal Beer. Lieber Lager became Gold Medal after winning a prize at some Paris exposition.
INTERVIEWER It must have been a very good beer.
VONNEGUT Long before my time. I never tasted any. It had a secret ingredient, I know. My grandfather and his brewmaster wouldn't let anybody watch while they put it in.
INTERVIEWER Do you know what it was?
VONNEGUT Coffee.
INTERVIEWER So your mother studied short-story writing -
VONNEGUT And my father painted pictures in a studio he'd set up on the top floor of the house. There wasn't much work for architects during the Great Depression - not much work for anybody. Strangely enough, though, Mother was right: even mediocre magazine writers were making money hand over fist.
INTERVIEWER So your mother took a very practical attitude toward writing.
VONNEGUT Not to say crass. She was a highly intelligent, cultivated woman, by the way. She went to the same high school I did, and was one of the few people who got nothing but A-pluses while she was there. She went east to a finishing school after that, and then traveled all over Europe. She was fluent in German and French. I still have her high-school report cards somewhere. A-plus, A-plus, A-plus... She was a good writer, it turned out, but she had no talent for the vulgarity the slick magazines required. Fortunately, I was loaded with vulgarity, so when I grew up I was able to make her dream come true. Writing for Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan and Ladies' Home Journal and so on was as easy as falling off a log for me. I only wish she'd lived to see it. I only wish she'd lived to see all her grandchildren. She has 10. She didn't even get to see the first one. I made another one of her dreams come true: I lived on Cape Cod for many years. She always wanted to live on Cape Cod. It's probably very common for sons to try to make their mothers' impossible dreams come true. I adopted my sister's sons after she died, and it's spooky to watch them try to make her impossible dreams come true.
INTERVIEWER What were your sister's dreams like?
VONNEGUT She wanted to live like a member of The Swiss Family Robinson, with impossibly friendly animals in impossibly congenial isolation. Her oldest son, Jim, has been a goat farmer on a mountaintop in Jamaica for the past eight years. No telephone. No electricity.
INTERVIEWER The Indianapolis high school you and your mother attended -
VONNEGUT And my father. Shortridge High.
INTERVIEWER It had a daily paper, I believe.
VONNEGUT Yes. The Shortridge Daily Echo. There was a print shop right in the school. Students wrote the paper. Students set the type. I've always found it easy to write. Also, I learned to write for peers rather than for teachers. Most beginning writers don't get to write for peers - to catch hell from peers.
INTERVIEWER So every afternoon you would go to the Echo office -
VONNEGUT Yeah. And one time, while I was writing, I happened to sniff my armpits absentmindedly. Several people saw me do it, and thought it was funny - and ever after that I was given the name "Snarf". In the annual for my graduating class, the class of 1940, I'm listed as "Kurt Snarfield Vonnegut, Jr." Technically, I wasn't really a snarf. A snarf was a person who went around sniffing girls' bicycle saddles. I didn't do that. Twerp also had a very specific meaning, which few people know now. Through careless usage, twerp is a pretty formless insult now.
INTERVIEWER What is a twerp in the strictest sense, in the original sense?
VONNEGUT It's a person who inserts a set of false teeth between the cheeks of his ass.
INTERVIEWER I see.
VONNEGUT I beg your pardon; between the cheeks of his or her ass. I'm always offending feminists that way.
INTERVIEWER I don't quite understand why someone would do that with false teeth.
VONNEGUT In order to bite the buttons off the backseats of taxicabs. That's the only reason twerps do it. It's all that turns them on.
INTERVIEWER You went to Cornell University after Shortridge?
VONNEGUT I imagine.
INTERVIEWER You imagine?
VONNEGUT I had a friend who was a heavy drinker. If somebody asked him if he'd been drunk the night before, he would always answer offhandedly, "Oh, I imagine." I've always liked that answer. It acknowledges life as a dream. Cornell was a boozy dream, partly because of booze itself, and partly because I was enrolled exclusively in courses I had no talent for. My father and brother agreed that I should study chemistry, since my brother had done so well with chemicals at MIT. He's eight years older than I am. Funnier, too. His most famous discovery is that silver iodide will sometimes make it rain or snow.
INTERVIEWER Was your sister funny, too?
VONNEGUT Oh, yes. There was an odd cruel streak to her sense of humour, though, which didn't fit in with the rest of her character somehow. She thought it was terribly funny whenever anybody fell down. One time she saw a woman come out of a streetcar horizontally, and she laughed for weeks after that. We loved Laurel and Hardy. You know what one of the funniest things is that can happen in a film?
INTERVIEWER No.
VONNEGUT To have somebody walk through what looks like a shallow little puddle, but which is actually six feet deep.
INTERVIEWER Did you take a degree in chemistry at Cornell?
VONNEGUT I was flunking everything by the middle of my junior year. I was delighted to join the army and go to war. After the war, I went to the University of Chicago, where I was pleased to study anthropology, a science that was mostly poetry, that involved almost no math at all. I was married by then, and soon had one kid, who was Mark. He would later go crazy, of course, and write a fine book about it - The Eden Express. He has just fathered a kid himself, my first grandchild, a boy named Zachary. Mark is finishing second year in Harvard Medical School, and will be about the only member of his class not to be in debt when he graduates - because of the book. That's a pretty decent recovery from a crack-up, I'd say.
INTERVIEWER What was your dissertation?
VONNEGUT Cat's Cradle.
INTERVIEWER But you wrote that years after you left Chicago, didn't you?
VONNEGUT I left Chicago without writing a dissertation - and without a degree. All my ideas for dissertations had been rejected, and I was broke, so I took a job as a PR man for General Electric in Schenectady. Twenty years later, I got a letter from a new dean at Chicago, who had been looking through my dossier. Under the rules of the university, he said, a published work of high quality could be substituted for a dissertation, so I was entitled to an MA. He had shown Cat's Cradle to the anthropology department, and they had said it was halfway decent anthropology, so they were mailing me my degree. I'm class of 1972 or so.
INTERVIEWER Congratulations.
VONNEGUT It was nothing, really. A piece of cake.
INTERVIEWER Let's talk about the women in your books.
VONNEGUT There aren't any. No real women, no love.
INTERVIEWER Is this worth expounding upon?
VONNEGUT It's a mechanical problem. So much of what happens in storytelling is mechanical, has to do with the technical problems of how to make a story work. Cowboy stories and policeman stories end in shoot-outs, for example, because shoot-outs are the most reliable mechanisms for making such stories end. There is nothing like death to say what is always such an artificial thing to say: The End. I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don't want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that's the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.
INTERVIEWER So you keep love out.
VONNEGUT I have other things I want to talk about.
INTERVIEWER Not many writers talk about the mechanics of stories.
VONNEGUT I am such a barbarous technocrat that I believe they can be tinkered with like Model T Fords.
INTERVIEWER To what end?
VONNEGUT To give the reader pleasure.
INTERVIEWER When I asked you a while back which member of your family had influenced you most as a writer, you said your mother. I had expected you to say your sister, since you talked so much about her in Slapstick.
VONNEGUT I said in Slapstick that she was the person I wrote for - that every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind. That's the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind. I didn't realise that she was the person I wrote for until after she died.
INTERVIEWER She loved literature?
VONNEGUT She wrote wonderfully well. She didn't read much - but then again, neither in later years did Henry David Thoreau. My father was the same way: he didn't read much, but he could write like a dream. Such letters my father and sister wrote! When I compare their prose with mine, I am ashamed. She could have been a remarkable sculptor, too. I bawled her out one time for not doing more with the talents she had. She replied that having talent doesn't carry with it the obligation that something has to be done with it. This was startling news to me. I thought people were supposed to grab their talents and run as far and fast as they could.
INTERVIEWER What do you think now?
VONNEGUT Well - what my sister said now seems a peculiarly feminine sort of wisdom. I have two daughters who are as talented as she was, and both of them are damned if they are going to lose their poise and senses of humour by snatching up their talents and desperately running as far and as fast as they can. They saw me run as far and as fast as I could - and it must have looked like quite a crazy performance to them. And this is the worst possible metaphor, for what they actually saw was a man sitting still for decades.
INTERVIEWER At a typewriter.
VONNEGUT Yes, and smoking his fool head off.
INTERVIEWER Have you ever stopped smoking?
VONNEGUT Twice. Once I did it cold turkey, and turned into Santa Claus. I became roly-poly. I was approaching 250lb. I stopped for almost a year, and then the University of Hawaii brought me to Oahu to speak. I was drinking out of a coconut on the roof of the Ili Kai one night, and all I had to do to complete the ring of my happiness was to smoke a cigarette. Which I did.
INTERVIEWER The second time?
VONNEGUT Very recently - last year. I paid Smokenders $150 to help me quit, over a period of six weeks. It was exactly as they had promised - easy and instructive. I won my graduation certificate and recognition pin. The only trouble was that I had also gone insane. I was supremely happy and proud, but those around me found me unbearably opinionated and abrupt and boisterous. Also: I had stopped writing. I didn't even write letters anymore. I had made a bad trade, evidently. So I started smoking again. As the National Association of Manufacturers used to say, There's no such thing as a free lunch.
INTERVIEWER Do you really think creative writing can be taught?
VONNEGUT About the same way golf can be taught. A pro can point out obvious flaws in your swing. I did that well, I think, at the University of Iowa for two years. Gail Godwin and John Irving and Jonathan Penner and Bruce Dobler and John Casey and Jane Casey were all students of mine out there. They've all published wonderful stuff since then. I taught creative writing badly at Harvard - because my marriage was breaking up, and because I was commuting every week to Cambridge from New York. I taught even worse at City College a couple of years ago. I had too many other projects going on at the same time. I don't have the will to teach anymore. I only know the theory.
INTERVIEWER You have been a public relations man and an advertising man -
VONNEGUT Oh, I imagine.
INTERVIEWER Was this painful? I mean - did you feel your talent was being wasted, being crippled?
VONNEGUT No. That's romance - that work of that sort damages a writer's soul. At Iowa, Dick Yates and I used to give a lecture each year on the writer and the free-enterprise system. The students hated it. We would talk about all the hack jobs writers could take in case they found themselves starving to death, or in case they wanted to accumulate enough capital to finance the writing of a book. Since publishers aren't putting money into first novels anymore, and since the magazines have died, and since television isn't buying from young freelancers anymore, and since the foundations give grants only to old poops like me, young writers are going to have to support themselves as shameless hacks. Otherwise, we are soon going to find ourselves without a contemporary literature. There is only one genuinely ghastly thing hack jobs do to writers, and that is to waste their precious time.
INTERVIEWER No joke.
VONNEGUT A tragedy. I just keep trying to think of ways, even horrible ways, for young writers to somehow hang on.
INTERVIEWER Should young writers be subsidised?
VONNEGUT
Something's got to be done, now that free enterprise has made it impossible for them to support themselves through free enterprise. I was a sensational businessman in the beginning - for the simple reason that there was so much business to be done. When I was working for General Electric, I wrote a story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect", the first story I ever wrote. I mailed it off to Collier's. Knox Burger was fiction editor there. Knox told me what was wrong with it and how to fix it. I did what he said, and he bought the story for $750, six weeks' pay at GE. I wrote another, and he paid me $950, and suggested that it was perhaps time for me to quit GE. Which I did. I moved to Provincetown. Eventually, my price for a short story got up to $2,900 a crack. Think of that. And Knox got me a couple of agents who were as shrewd about storytelling as he was - Kenneth Littauer, who had been his predecessor at Collier's, and Max Wilkinson, who had been a story editor for MGM. And let it be put on the record here that Knox Burger, who is about my age, discovered and encouraged more good young writers than any other editor of his time. I don't think that's ever been written down anywhere. It's a fact known only to writers, and one that could easily vanish, if it isn't somewhere written down.
INTERVIEWER Do you have a new mentor now?
VONNEGUT No. I guess I'm too old to find one. What ever I write now is set in type without comment by my publisher, who is younger than I am, by editors, by anyone. I don't have my sister to write for anymore. Suddenly, there are all these unfilled jobs in my life.
INTERVIEWER Do you feel as though you're up there without a net under you?
VONNEGUT And without a balancing pole, either. It gives me the heebie-jeebies sometimes.
INTERVIEWER Is there anything else you'd like to add?
VONNEGUT I want to say, too, that humourists are very commonly the youngest children in their families. When I was the littlest kid at our supper table, there was only one way I could get anybody's attention, and that was to be funny. I had to specialise. I used to listen to radio comedians very intently, so I could learn how to make jokes. And that's what my books are, now that I'm a grownup - mosaics of jokes.
INTERVIEWER Do you have any favourite jokes?
VONNEGUT Well - you won't laugh. Nobody ever laughs. But one is an old Two Black Crows joke. The Two Black Crows were white guys in blackface - named Moran and Mack. They made phonograph records of their routines, two supposedly black guys talking lazily to each other. Anyway, one of them says, "Last night I dreamed I was eating flannel cakes." The other one says, "Is that so?" And the first one says, "And when I woke up, the blanket was gone."
INTERVIEWER Um.
VONNEGUT I told you you wouldn't laugh. The other champion joke requires your cooperation. I will ask you a question, and you have to say "No."
INTERVIEWER OK.
VONNEGUT Do you know why cream is so much more expensive than milk?
INTERVIEWER No.
VONNEGUT Because the cows hate to squat on those little bottles. See, you didn't laugh again, but I give you my sacred word of honour that those are splendid jokes. Exquisite craftsmanship.
INTERVIEWER If your parents hadn't lost all their money, what would you be doing now?
VONNEGUT I'd be an Indianapolis architect - like my father and grandfather. And very happy, too. I still wish that had happened. One thing, anyway: one of the best young architects out there lives in a house my father built for our family the year I was born - 1922. My initials, and my sister's initials, and my brother's initials are all written in leaded glass in the three little windows by the front door.
INTERVIEWER So you have good old days you hanker for.
VONNEGUT Yes. Whenever I go to Indianapolis, the same question asks itself over and over again in my head: where's my bed, where's my bed? And if my father's and grandfather's ghosts haunt that town, they must be wondering where all their buildings have gone to. The centre of the city, where most of their buildings were, has been turned into parking lots. They must be wondering where all their relatives went, too. They grew up in a huge extended family which is no more. I got the slightest taste of that big family thing. And when I went to the University of Chicago, and I heard the head of the Department of Anthropology, Robert Redfield, lecture on the folk society, which was essentially a stable, isolated extended family, he did not have to tell me how nice that could be.
INTERVIEWER Anything else?
VONNEGUT Perhaps we should say something at this point how this interview itself was done - unless candour would somehow spoil everything.
INTERVIEWER Let the chips fall where they may.
VONNEGUT Four different interviews with me were submitted to The Paris Review. These were patched together to form a single interview, which was shown to me. This scheme worked only fairly well, so I called in yet another interviewer to make it all of a piece. I was that person. With utmost tenderness, I interviewed myself.
INTERVIEWER I see. Our last question. If you were Commissar of Publishing in the United States, what would you do to alleviate the present deplorable situation?
VONNEGUT There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers.
INTERVIEWER So - ?
VONNEGUT I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.
INTERVIEWER Thank you.
VONNEGUT Thank you.
Merged Literary works
"Machiavelli's The Little Prince"
Antoine de Saint-Exupery's classic children's tale as presented by Machiavelli. The whimsy of human nature is embodied in many delightful and intriguing characters, all of whom are executed.
"Green Eggs and Hamlet"
Would you kill him in his bed? Thrust a dagger through his head? I would not, could not, kill the King. I could not do that evil thing. I would not wed this girl, you see. Now get her to a nunnery.
"Fahrenheit 451 of the Vanities"
An '80s yuppie is denied books. He does not object, or even notice.
"Where's Walden?"
Alas, the challenge of locating Henry David Thoreau in each richly-detailed drawing loses its appeal when it quickly becomes clear that he is always in the woods.
"Catch-22 in the Rye"
Holden learns that if you're insane, you'll probably flunk out of prep school, but if you're flunking out of prep school, you're probably not insane.
"2001: A Space Iliad"
The Hal 9000 computer wages an insane 10-year war against the Greeks after falling victim to the Y2K bug.
"Rikki-Kon-Tiki-Tavi"
Thor Heyerdahl recounts his attempt to prove Rudyard Kipling's theory that the mongoose first came to India on a raft from Polynesia.
"The Maltese Faulkner"
Is the black bird a tortured symbol of Sam's struggles with race and family? Does it signify his decay of soul along with the soul of the Old South? Is it merely a crow, mocking his attempts to understand? Or is it worth a cool mil?
"Jane Eyre Jordan"
Plucky English orphan girl survives hardships to lead the Chicago Bulls to the NBA championship.
"Looking for Mr. Godot"
A young woman waits for Mr. Right to enter her life. She has a loooong wait.
"The Scarlet Pimpernel Letter"
An 18th-century English nobleman leads a double life, freeing comely young adulteresses from the prisons of post-Revolution France.
"Lorna Dune"
An English farmer, Paul Atreides, falls for the daughter of a notorious rival clan, the Harkonnens, and pursues a career as a giant worm jockey in order to impress her.
"The Remains of the Day of the Jackal"
A formal English butler puts his loyalty to his employer above all else, until he is persuaded to join a plot to assassinate Charles deGaulle.
"The Invisible Man of La Mancha"
Don Quixote discovers a mysterious elixir which renders him invisible. He proceeds to go on a mad rampage of corruption and terror, attacking innocent people in the streets and all the while singing "To fight the Invisible Man!"until he is finally stopped by a windmill.
"Singing in the Black Rain"
A gang of vicious Japanese druglords beat the crap out of Gene Kelly.
"Of Three Blind Mice and Men"
Burgess Meredith has his limbs hacked off by a psychopathic farmer's wife. Did you ever see such a sight in your life?
"Planet of the Grapes of Wrath"
An astronaut lands on mysterious planet, only to discover that it is his very own home planet of Earth, which has been taken over by the Joads, a race of dirt-poor corn farmers who miraculously developed rudimentary technology and evolved the ability to speak after exposure to nuclear radiation.
"Paradise Lost in Space"
Satan, Moloch, and Belial are sentenced to spend eternity in a flying saucer with a goofy robot, an evil scientist, and 2 annoying children.
"The Exorstentialist"
Camus' psychological thriller about a priest who casts out a demon by convincing it that there's really no purpose to what it's doing.
"Gone with the Wind in the Willows"
The merry antics of Mole, Rat, Badger and Mr. Toad as they burn a swathe of destruction through Georgia during the American Civil War.
"Heart of Dave Barry Turns 50"
Dave Barry takes a dark but humorous journey to visit his god-like doctor to have his prostate examined. In the office he nearly succumbs to the cold sterile atmosphere of the examining room but he escapes after killing his doctor. He then takes us on a sharp-witted tour of Disney World
Antoine de Saint-Exupery's classic children's tale as presented by Machiavelli. The whimsy of human nature is embodied in many delightful and intriguing characters, all of whom are executed.
"Green Eggs and Hamlet"
Would you kill him in his bed? Thrust a dagger through his head? I would not, could not, kill the King. I could not do that evil thing. I would not wed this girl, you see. Now get her to a nunnery.
"Fahrenheit 451 of the Vanities"
An '80s yuppie is denied books. He does not object, or even notice.
"Where's Walden?"
Alas, the challenge of locating Henry David Thoreau in each richly-detailed drawing loses its appeal when it quickly becomes clear that he is always in the woods.
"Catch-22 in the Rye"
Holden learns that if you're insane, you'll probably flunk out of prep school, but if you're flunking out of prep school, you're probably not insane.
"2001: A Space Iliad"
The Hal 9000 computer wages an insane 10-year war against the Greeks after falling victim to the Y2K bug.
"Rikki-Kon-Tiki-Tavi"
Thor Heyerdahl recounts his attempt to prove Rudyard Kipling's theory that the mongoose first came to India on a raft from Polynesia.
"The Maltese Faulkner"
Is the black bird a tortured symbol of Sam's struggles with race and family? Does it signify his decay of soul along with the soul of the Old South? Is it merely a crow, mocking his attempts to understand? Or is it worth a cool mil?
"Jane Eyre Jordan"
Plucky English orphan girl survives hardships to lead the Chicago Bulls to the NBA championship.
"Looking for Mr. Godot"
A young woman waits for Mr. Right to enter her life. She has a loooong wait.
"The Scarlet Pimpernel Letter"
An 18th-century English nobleman leads a double life, freeing comely young adulteresses from the prisons of post-Revolution France.
"Lorna Dune"
An English farmer, Paul Atreides, falls for the daughter of a notorious rival clan, the Harkonnens, and pursues a career as a giant worm jockey in order to impress her.
"The Remains of the Day of the Jackal"
A formal English butler puts his loyalty to his employer above all else, until he is persuaded to join a plot to assassinate Charles deGaulle.
"The Invisible Man of La Mancha"
Don Quixote discovers a mysterious elixir which renders him invisible. He proceeds to go on a mad rampage of corruption and terror, attacking innocent people in the streets and all the while singing "To fight the Invisible Man!"until he is finally stopped by a windmill.
"Singing in the Black Rain"
A gang of vicious Japanese druglords beat the crap out of Gene Kelly.
"Of Three Blind Mice and Men"
Burgess Meredith has his limbs hacked off by a psychopathic farmer's wife. Did you ever see such a sight in your life?
"Planet of the Grapes of Wrath"
An astronaut lands on mysterious planet, only to discover that it is his very own home planet of Earth, which has been taken over by the Joads, a race of dirt-poor corn farmers who miraculously developed rudimentary technology and evolved the ability to speak after exposure to nuclear radiation.
"Paradise Lost in Space"
Satan, Moloch, and Belial are sentenced to spend eternity in a flying saucer with a goofy robot, an evil scientist, and 2 annoying children.
"The Exorstentialist"
Camus' psychological thriller about a priest who casts out a demon by convincing it that there's really no purpose to what it's doing.
"Gone with the Wind in the Willows"
The merry antics of Mole, Rat, Badger and Mr. Toad as they burn a swathe of destruction through Georgia during the American Civil War.
"Heart of Dave Barry Turns 50"
Dave Barry takes a dark but humorous journey to visit his god-like doctor to have his prostate examined. In the office he nearly succumbs to the cold sterile atmosphere of the examining room but he escapes after killing his doctor. He then takes us on a sharp-witted tour of Disney World
Jan 23, 2007
Fear and Loathing on the Internet
We were trolling on MysticWicks with a shared account, somewhere on the edge of the internet, when the drugs started to take hold.
I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded, maybe you should takeover baiting" and suddenly there was a terrible roar and the forum was full of what looked like huge fluff bunny Wiccans, swooping and moaning and whining around our account.
"Holy Jesus, what are these goddamn animals?"
Very soon, we would both be completely twisted, but there was no going back, we would have to ride it out.
The backrooms of HIMEOBS were like a narcotics lab. I blamed Captain Da. We had two bags of grass, 75 caffeine pills, two crates of Red Bull, 5 sheets of acid and a whole galaxy of uppers downers, screamers, laughers, half a salt shaker full of cocaine...and half a pint of raw Ether.
Not that we needed that, but when you get locked into a serious trolling habit, the tendency is to push it as far as you can go.
Sympathy for the Devil was the only CD we had...so we played it on repeat as a demented counterpoint to the radio....
"Hey, there's a n00b who doesn't look like a moran, lets give him a go on the troll account."
"Are you crazy? That kid's probably an undercover mod!"
Before I could mount any argument, we were logged out and I got the MSN message "hot damn! I never trolled a forum before!"
“Is that right, well I guess you're about ready huh?”
“We're your friends, we're not like the others.”
“Oh Christ, he's gone around the bend....No more of that talk or I'll put the leeches on you.”
How long could we maintain, how long before one of us starts raving and ranting at this boy? This same website was the last known location of Giggles. Will he make that same grim connection when the Captain starts screaming about bats and huge emo kids flaming his troll?
Well, we'll just have to post him disguised links of the Last Measure. He'd report us at once to some Nazi moderator and they'd hunt us down like dogs.
Jesus, did I just type that? Or just thinking it? Was I writing? Could he read anything?
“Can you read this?”
“Thats good, because I want you to know we're on our way to Gaia.com to find the Trolling Dream. I want you to have all the background because this is a very ominous assignment with overtones of extreme personal danger. Hell, I forgot about the Red Bull, you want one?”
“Naw.”
“How about some ether?”
“What!?”
“Never mind. I want you to understand that this man signing up the fake accounts is Captain Da, he's not just some dingbat I grabbed off the Strip. Shit, look at him, he doesn't look like you or me right. Thats because he's a foreigner I think he's probably Tongan, it doesn't matter. Are you prejudiced?”
“Hell no!”
“I didn't think so. In spite of his race, this man is extremely valuable to me. This is important goddamnit, this is a true story."
“Hey, keep your hands off my fucking neck!”
I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded, maybe you should takeover baiting" and suddenly there was a terrible roar and the forum was full of what looked like huge fluff bunny Wiccans, swooping and moaning and whining around our account.
"Holy Jesus, what are these goddamn animals?"
Very soon, we would both be completely twisted, but there was no going back, we would have to ride it out.
The backrooms of HIMEOBS were like a narcotics lab. I blamed Captain Da. We had two bags of grass, 75 caffeine pills, two crates of Red Bull, 5 sheets of acid and a whole galaxy of uppers downers, screamers, laughers, half a salt shaker full of cocaine...and half a pint of raw Ether.
Not that we needed that, but when you get locked into a serious trolling habit, the tendency is to push it as far as you can go.
Sympathy for the Devil was the only CD we had...so we played it on repeat as a demented counterpoint to the radio....
"Hey, there's a n00b who doesn't look like a moran, lets give him a go on the troll account."
"Are you crazy? That kid's probably an undercover mod!"
Before I could mount any argument, we were logged out and I got the MSN message "hot damn! I never trolled a forum before!"
“Is that right, well I guess you're about ready huh?”
“We're your friends, we're not like the others.”
“Oh Christ, he's gone around the bend....No more of that talk or I'll put the leeches on you.”
How long could we maintain, how long before one of us starts raving and ranting at this boy? This same website was the last known location of Giggles. Will he make that same grim connection when the Captain starts screaming about bats and huge emo kids flaming his troll?
Well, we'll just have to post him disguised links of the Last Measure. He'd report us at once to some Nazi moderator and they'd hunt us down like dogs.
Jesus, did I just type that? Or just thinking it? Was I writing? Could he read anything?
“Can you read this?”
“Thats good, because I want you to know we're on our way to Gaia.com to find the Trolling Dream. I want you to have all the background because this is a very ominous assignment with overtones of extreme personal danger. Hell, I forgot about the Red Bull, you want one?”
“Naw.”
“How about some ether?”
“What!?”
“Never mind. I want you to understand that this man signing up the fake accounts is Captain Da, he's not just some dingbat I grabbed off the Strip. Shit, look at him, he doesn't look like you or me right. Thats because he's a foreigner I think he's probably Tongan, it doesn't matter. Are you prejudiced?”
“Hell no!”
“I didn't think so. In spite of his race, this man is extremely valuable to me. This is important goddamnit, this is a true story."
“Hey, keep your hands off my fucking neck!”
Mar 3, 2006
Rewriting the City: Chapter 3
The bar was even darker then I had remembered. The only real light came from above the flickering neon tube behind the bar, which was little more then a slab of wood with some stools and drinks on top of it. I moved past the crowded tables to reach it, cutting through the curls of smoke that hung in the air.
Elbowing my way past the regulars probably wasn't the best idea, but I was in a hurry and didn't give a damn about them. Its not like anyone here would really want to kill me. Unless I knocked over a pint or something, but thats practically understandable. Anyway, I made it to the bar and managed to get the barmaid's attention. Taking a $20 note out of my wallet, I ordered a drink, then asked if the boss-man was available. She smiled briefly as I was given my drink and told me he'd be free in 5 minutes, in the first room on the left upstairs.
My time was up, I drained the last of my drink and ducked under the bar, heading for the stairs behind. Upstairs was pretty dark, as befitted the establishment. Rumour had it those shadows had hidden more than one assassin's knife or bullet, but I had no fear, as the boss was in, the meagre light coming from his office. I walked in, noting he was hunched over a bunch of papers, calculating figures on a small hand held device. Taking the seat opposite his desk, I spun it so the back faced him, then sat in it, arms crossed.
The silence continued for several seconds, his bald head hunched while I stared at an object several inches behind his left ear. I broke first. “Listen, I need The Hacker.”
Without even looking at me, he replied “go talk to Aini then Cain, I'm sure she'd be happy to help. Please close the door on the way out.”
“You know, I'm pretty sure I just spoke then, I recall my lips moving and everything. I didn't ask for Aini. She's good, a maths whiz for certain, but I don't need her skills. I want The Hacker. I need someone who was good enough to get into the Government Inc quantum databases first time around.”
“Alright then.” He opened a drawer and removed a piece of paper, putting it at the edge of the desk. “I'll assume this is Discordian-related business, shall I?”
I took the paper. “But of course. And thanks.”
“It'd better be. I pay my dues to you people, but if I find any of you abusing it, I wont hesitate to have you dragged out back and your knees broken. Don't forget that. Now get lost, its hard enough trying to cook the books 3 ways without you trying to read it upside down as well.”
The address was for a bar in an upscale part of town. The East Quadrant, to be exact. Nice sea views and uphill, both a plus for the landowners, bankers, record executives and other sorts of criminals. It must be something genetic in any ruling class, to flee away from the plebs to uphill, easily defended areas. Oh well. I ducked under the bar, before shoving through the crowd again to get out. Distracted, I was humming the tune in background and singing under my breath “back in the city again, I hope that you have been. The kind of poison, that you really oughta know...oh feels so good, I wish I could get this message over to you, now...”
I considered my options out on the street. No taxi was going to come in here, so I could either walk out and hope to find one, or go home for the evening. To hell with it, the night was still young and I had my legs. Making sure I had the piece of paper secure in my pocket, I started the hopefully not long walk. I didn't want to be exposed to the psychotecture for too long, insanity was an all too possible outcome.
20 minutes later, to my profound relief, I got my ride. Another 20 minutes passed and I was now a block away from the bar I needed to be at. I liked it around here. The streets were clean and the houses were well spaced and pleasing to the eye, the ones that could be seen at all, beyond the vast spaces and high hedges employed. This was an entertainment, not accommodation district, however. Expensive sounding and looking bars, restaurants and cinemas were the order of the day.
Mine was in fact just several feet away now. The cue was pretty small, as befitted the earliness of the night. I prepared to walk in as two mountains of men moved in front of me.
One of them rumbled “what do you think you're doing...sir?” with just the right amount of contempt. I sighed. I know I looked like a badly dishevilled detective, like a modern Columbo, but that was the sort of look I liked. It made deciding what to wear in the mornings so much easier.
“I'm trying to get in...but a pair of oafs are blocking me.” Before he could answer, I took two bills from my roll in my pocket and handed it to him before pushing past. I didn't stop to check, just assume it worked and keep walking.
Elbowing my way past the regulars probably wasn't the best idea, but I was in a hurry and didn't give a damn about them. Its not like anyone here would really want to kill me. Unless I knocked over a pint or something, but thats practically understandable. Anyway, I made it to the bar and managed to get the barmaid's attention. Taking a $20 note out of my wallet, I ordered a drink, then asked if the boss-man was available. She smiled briefly as I was given my drink and told me he'd be free in 5 minutes, in the first room on the left upstairs.
My time was up, I drained the last of my drink and ducked under the bar, heading for the stairs behind. Upstairs was pretty dark, as befitted the establishment. Rumour had it those shadows had hidden more than one assassin's knife or bullet, but I had no fear, as the boss was in, the meagre light coming from his office. I walked in, noting he was hunched over a bunch of papers, calculating figures on a small hand held device. Taking the seat opposite his desk, I spun it so the back faced him, then sat in it, arms crossed.
The silence continued for several seconds, his bald head hunched while I stared at an object several inches behind his left ear. I broke first. “Listen, I need The Hacker.”
Without even looking at me, he replied “go talk to Aini then Cain, I'm sure she'd be happy to help. Please close the door on the way out.”
“You know, I'm pretty sure I just spoke then, I recall my lips moving and everything. I didn't ask for Aini. She's good, a maths whiz for certain, but I don't need her skills. I want The Hacker. I need someone who was good enough to get into the Government Inc quantum databases first time around.”
“Alright then.” He opened a drawer and removed a piece of paper, putting it at the edge of the desk. “I'll assume this is Discordian-related business, shall I?”
I took the paper. “But of course. And thanks.”
“It'd better be. I pay my dues to you people, but if I find any of you abusing it, I wont hesitate to have you dragged out back and your knees broken. Don't forget that. Now get lost, its hard enough trying to cook the books 3 ways without you trying to read it upside down as well.”
The address was for a bar in an upscale part of town. The East Quadrant, to be exact. Nice sea views and uphill, both a plus for the landowners, bankers, record executives and other sorts of criminals. It must be something genetic in any ruling class, to flee away from the plebs to uphill, easily defended areas. Oh well. I ducked under the bar, before shoving through the crowd again to get out. Distracted, I was humming the tune in background and singing under my breath “back in the city again, I hope that you have been. The kind of poison, that you really oughta know...oh feels so good, I wish I could get this message over to you, now...”
I considered my options out on the street. No taxi was going to come in here, so I could either walk out and hope to find one, or go home for the evening. To hell with it, the night was still young and I had my legs. Making sure I had the piece of paper secure in my pocket, I started the hopefully not long walk. I didn't want to be exposed to the psychotecture for too long, insanity was an all too possible outcome.
20 minutes later, to my profound relief, I got my ride. Another 20 minutes passed and I was now a block away from the bar I needed to be at. I liked it around here. The streets were clean and the houses were well spaced and pleasing to the eye, the ones that could be seen at all, beyond the vast spaces and high hedges employed. This was an entertainment, not accommodation district, however. Expensive sounding and looking bars, restaurants and cinemas were the order of the day.
Mine was in fact just several feet away now. The cue was pretty small, as befitted the earliness of the night. I prepared to walk in as two mountains of men moved in front of me.
One of them rumbled “what do you think you're doing...sir?” with just the right amount of contempt. I sighed. I know I looked like a badly dishevilled detective, like a modern Columbo, but that was the sort of look I liked. It made deciding what to wear in the mornings so much easier.
“I'm trying to get in...but a pair of oafs are blocking me.” Before he could answer, I took two bills from my roll in my pocket and handed it to him before pushing past. I didn't stop to check, just assume it worked and keep walking.
Rewriting the City: Chapter 2
“Of course, he's a pretty hard person to forget.” His “shadow” as his nickname had been, was another private investigator, of sorts. He had the kind of skills you normally didn't see in most people, such as knowing how to pick locks, move very quietly and how to scale walls and bypass security systems with relative ease. He also had contacts everywhere, even in Government Inc. Chances were he was ex-DHS or something similar, though if you were really that “ex”, chances were you wouldn't be walking around or breathing. He wasn't exactly the sort of individual who you wouldn't turn your back on either.
“Yeah, I know of him” I replied. “Why, what has happened?”
“Well, its a rather long story. I heard from someone who worked at one of the labs in the city about a new drug that is being worked on. I'd come across its name before, in another of my cases, so I sent my Shadow to go find out what was going on. It made sense, what with his contacts. But a week or so later, I got this sent to me” he finished as he grabbed a slightly tattered sheet of paper which was folded inside his jacket pocket.
I looked at the picture in front of me, showing a grainy image of the Shadow coming out of a laboratory, with the date and time stamped in the corner. It was 10 days ago. “So you think he's sold out or turned and gone into the business for himself then?”
“Basically. He's had plenty of time to come forth with whatever he has, even if its nothing, and still hasn't. I tried to get a trace on who sent that, but unsurprisingly I was denied access to the post system. Someone there will know where its from, it got tagged so they have the reference number. I included that with the rest of the information.” With that he took a large envelope out of a pocket and handed it over. “Thats everything I have. Do you want the job or not?”
Well, it certainly had my interest, but there was one more criteria to fulfill. “How much can I expect to be paid?”
“Standard rates. I also know for a fact that the Shadow doesn't trust the banks and keeps his money as cash. I'm sure that extra incentive has its value to you.”
“Deal” I replied.
My first thoughts were to try and bribe, cajole or otherwise threaten some workers at the Post Office to find out who sent the picture. It would be nice to know who the unknown ally was and if they knew anything else. But it wasn't simply a matter of walking in and saying it was sent to the wrong address, could I have the return address please? They'd take it from me and process it, sending it back through the use of the reference number. That had been a nice little addition on the latest round of anti-terrorist legislation. Failing that, there were a few favours I could still call in. It'd probably be wise to do that, quite soon.
My first port of call had been my flat, where I picked up a few items and made a couple of calls. I didn't want to go to the Post Office until tomorrow, when I would be assured of large crowds. If someone from Government Inc and its various research labs had sent that picture, there would be questions asked and a crowd would make escape easier. I grabbed the old style Beretta pistol I kept in my safe and a couple of clips. I had meant to get one of the new neuro-disruptors, but the cost of those things was abominable. Plus they were apparently illegal or something, which probably explained the price. Nah, it would have to bit good old fashioned bits of fast moving metal, if diplomacy or cash failed. And since it was night time now, that possibility existed.
I made my way into the heartland of the City, the awful inner city that acted like a vortex for all the detritus of the surrounding area. Beggars and prostitutes mixed freely with thugs and drug runners here, the entrance to the slums of the City. Shacks were stacked precariously on top of each other, looking like they could crash down at any moment, taking large areas around with them. It was one giant festering rat hole, more tunnels than walkways which people traveled along in search of the next dollar, sexual conquest or high. In the small rooms the hastily constructed buildings here held, the widest ranges of narcotics, sex and valuable goods were sold. This chaotic nature was of course reflected in the Psychotecture, bringing it to a nightmarish fruition. I had found my destination. Walking to the nearest bar, I opened the door, hesitated for a moment, then dove into the darkness.
“Yeah, I know of him” I replied. “Why, what has happened?”
“Well, its a rather long story. I heard from someone who worked at one of the labs in the city about a new drug that is being worked on. I'd come across its name before, in another of my cases, so I sent my Shadow to go find out what was going on. It made sense, what with his contacts. But a week or so later, I got this sent to me” he finished as he grabbed a slightly tattered sheet of paper which was folded inside his jacket pocket.
I looked at the picture in front of me, showing a grainy image of the Shadow coming out of a laboratory, with the date and time stamped in the corner. It was 10 days ago. “So you think he's sold out or turned and gone into the business for himself then?”
“Basically. He's had plenty of time to come forth with whatever he has, even if its nothing, and still hasn't. I tried to get a trace on who sent that, but unsurprisingly I was denied access to the post system. Someone there will know where its from, it got tagged so they have the reference number. I included that with the rest of the information.” With that he took a large envelope out of a pocket and handed it over. “Thats everything I have. Do you want the job or not?”
Well, it certainly had my interest, but there was one more criteria to fulfill. “How much can I expect to be paid?”
“Standard rates. I also know for a fact that the Shadow doesn't trust the banks and keeps his money as cash. I'm sure that extra incentive has its value to you.”
“Deal” I replied.
My first thoughts were to try and bribe, cajole or otherwise threaten some workers at the Post Office to find out who sent the picture. It would be nice to know who the unknown ally was and if they knew anything else. But it wasn't simply a matter of walking in and saying it was sent to the wrong address, could I have the return address please? They'd take it from me and process it, sending it back through the use of the reference number. That had been a nice little addition on the latest round of anti-terrorist legislation. Failing that, there were a few favours I could still call in. It'd probably be wise to do that, quite soon.
My first port of call had been my flat, where I picked up a few items and made a couple of calls. I didn't want to go to the Post Office until tomorrow, when I would be assured of large crowds. If someone from Government Inc and its various research labs had sent that picture, there would be questions asked and a crowd would make escape easier. I grabbed the old style Beretta pistol I kept in my safe and a couple of clips. I had meant to get one of the new neuro-disruptors, but the cost of those things was abominable. Plus they were apparently illegal or something, which probably explained the price. Nah, it would have to bit good old fashioned bits of fast moving metal, if diplomacy or cash failed. And since it was night time now, that possibility existed.
I made my way into the heartland of the City, the awful inner city that acted like a vortex for all the detritus of the surrounding area. Beggars and prostitutes mixed freely with thugs and drug runners here, the entrance to the slums of the City. Shacks were stacked precariously on top of each other, looking like they could crash down at any moment, taking large areas around with them. It was one giant festering rat hole, more tunnels than walkways which people traveled along in search of the next dollar, sexual conquest or high. In the small rooms the hastily constructed buildings here held, the widest ranges of narcotics, sex and valuable goods were sold. This chaotic nature was of course reflected in the Psychotecture, bringing it to a nightmarish fruition. I had found my destination. Walking to the nearest bar, I opened the door, hesitated for a moment, then dove into the darkness.
Rewriting The City: Chapter 1
I made my way through the darkened streets to the Open Bar, clutching at the roll of money in my pocket tightly. I hated the City at this time of evening, just as the sun was setting. The street lights shone their awful orange light over the odd, mind-defying angles and corners, illuminating the semi-darkness that was around me in a way that was far worse then had it been just pitch black. Shapes stumbled around in the darkness as I gripped my roll of cash even harder. It had been a tough job, but worth it. The Presbyterian Church had paid well for their security upgrade in their headquarters and anything that upset the Lord's Brigades was well worth doing. It was strange, you'd think those two groups would get along, but the Presbyterians work among the City slums, plus their denunciations of the evils of capitalism, toned down lately of course, had made them enemies in very high places.
Ah, here I was. I looked up to the narrow door of the Open Bar. The taller buildings either side of the squat bar threw deeper shadows in the relative darkness, but here, a step away from the Bar, I could be more or less assured of safety. I swung the door inwards, savouring the bright, cheery light within, a stark comparison to the architects nightmare that lay outside.
Dying for a scotch, I moved my way up to the bar itself. It wasn't that busy this time of evening. Most of the people who came here didn't work “normal” office hours anyway, me among them, so the busy times were often random and unpredictable. Grabbing a stool and peeling a note from the roll, I said to Mangrove “some Glenlivet thanks. Actually, make it a double, with ice.” He came back swiftly with the drink, saying “its funny you should be in today. LMNO was asking about where you were.”
“Oh?” I replied, before taking a sip. “What was it about?”
“He said he may have a job for you, something that suited your particular skills, he said.”
“Oh dear, that never sounds good. He's pretty competent on his own, I can't see why he'd need me for anything.”
“Well, he has got this new client whose case is taking up a lot of his time...”
“Hmm, maybe I'll contact him and see whats happening. Thanks for the tip-off.”
“No problem” Mangrove replied as he went to serve another customer.
So, another job, I thought to myself as I sipped on the scotch. That could be useful. Ever since the “incident” 9 months ago, I had been more or less without steady employment. I mean, sure, it wasn't like there weren't jobs available. But working in a factory 11 hours a day until I was 70 just didn't have the appeal, nor did drug running for the Matarese or the Cosa Nostra or whoever had control of the trade, for that matter.
Finishing the drink, I grabbed my cell and made a call to LMNO's office. One ring...two rings..3...just as my thumb started to move to the hang up button, someone answered. “Hello?” LMNO's voice came, crystal clear down the line.
“Hi, its Cain here,” I answered, “I heard you had a job offer for me?”
“Yeah. Well, kind of. Its complicated.”
“We'll need to talk then. You name a time you're free.”
“We'll, I can be at the bar in, say 10 minutes? It'll have to be brief, as I've got a client to meet straight afterwards.
“That'll be fine”, I replied. “See you in ten.” The line went dead.
I enjoyed the rest of my drink, idly waiting. It wasn't like I had any pressing engagements, plus the Open Bar was very welcoming which was a nice change in the City. I had just finished the scotch and was about to go for another, when LMNO walked in and took a seat besides me.
“Hi, good to see you're here. You wanna know what this is about then?”
“Its a good place to start” I replied, turning on my stool to face him.
“OK, I'm going to have to be brief but I do have some additional information written down here. Basically, do you remember my business partner, the Shadow?”
Ah, here I was. I looked up to the narrow door of the Open Bar. The taller buildings either side of the squat bar threw deeper shadows in the relative darkness, but here, a step away from the Bar, I could be more or less assured of safety. I swung the door inwards, savouring the bright, cheery light within, a stark comparison to the architects nightmare that lay outside.
Dying for a scotch, I moved my way up to the bar itself. It wasn't that busy this time of evening. Most of the people who came here didn't work “normal” office hours anyway, me among them, so the busy times were often random and unpredictable. Grabbing a stool and peeling a note from the roll, I said to Mangrove “some Glenlivet thanks. Actually, make it a double, with ice.” He came back swiftly with the drink, saying “its funny you should be in today. LMNO was asking about where you were.”
“Oh?” I replied, before taking a sip. “What was it about?”
“He said he may have a job for you, something that suited your particular skills, he said.”
“Oh dear, that never sounds good. He's pretty competent on his own, I can't see why he'd need me for anything.”
“Well, he has got this new client whose case is taking up a lot of his time...”
“Hmm, maybe I'll contact him and see whats happening. Thanks for the tip-off.”
“No problem” Mangrove replied as he went to serve another customer.
So, another job, I thought to myself as I sipped on the scotch. That could be useful. Ever since the “incident” 9 months ago, I had been more or less without steady employment. I mean, sure, it wasn't like there weren't jobs available. But working in a factory 11 hours a day until I was 70 just didn't have the appeal, nor did drug running for the Matarese or the Cosa Nostra or whoever had control of the trade, for that matter.
Finishing the drink, I grabbed my cell and made a call to LMNO's office. One ring...two rings..3...just as my thumb started to move to the hang up button, someone answered. “Hello?” LMNO's voice came, crystal clear down the line.
“Hi, its Cain here,” I answered, “I heard you had a job offer for me?”
“Yeah. Well, kind of. Its complicated.”
“We'll need to talk then. You name a time you're free.”
“We'll, I can be at the bar in, say 10 minutes? It'll have to be brief, as I've got a client to meet straight afterwards.
“That'll be fine”, I replied. “See you in ten.” The line went dead.
I enjoyed the rest of my drink, idly waiting. It wasn't like I had any pressing engagements, plus the Open Bar was very welcoming which was a nice change in the City. I had just finished the scotch and was about to go for another, when LMNO walked in and took a seat besides me.
“Hi, good to see you're here. You wanna know what this is about then?”
“Its a good place to start” I replied, turning on my stool to face him.
“OK, I'm going to have to be brief but I do have some additional information written down here. Basically, do you remember my business partner, the Shadow?”
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