Breakfast of Champions

Chapter 21

Kilgore Trout entered the cocktail lounge. His feet were fiery hot. They were encased not only in shoes and socks, but in clear plastic, too. They could not sweat, they could not breathe.

Rabo Karabekian and Beatrice Keedsler did not see him come in.

They were surrounded by new affectionate friends at the piano bar. Karabekian’s speech had been splendidly received. Everybody agreed now that Midland City had one of the greatest paintings in the world.

“All you had to do was explain,” said Bonnie MacMahon. “I understand now.”

“I didn’t think there was anything to explain,” said Carlo Maritino, the builder, wonderingly. “But there was, by God.”

Abe Cohen, the jeweler, said to Karabekian, “If artists would explain more, people would like art more. You realize that?”

And so on.

Trout was feeling spooky. He thought maybe a lot of people were going to greet him as effusively as Milo Maritimo had done, and he had had no experience with celebrations like that. But nobody got in his way.

His old friend Anonymity was by his side again, and the two of them chose a table near Dwayne Hoover and me. All he could see of me was the reflection of candle flames in my mirrored glasses, in my leaks.

Dwayne Hoover was still mentally absent from activities in the cocktail lounge. He sat like a lump of nose putty, staring at something long ago and far away.

Dwayne moved his lips as Trout sat down. He was saying this soundlessly, and it had nothing to do with Trout or me: “Goodbye,

Blue Monday.”

Trout had a fat manila envelope with him. Milo Maritimo had given it to him. It contained a program for the Festival of the Arts, a letter of welcome to Trout from Fred T. Barry, the Chairman of the Festival, a timetable of events during the coming week—and some other things.

Trout also carried a copy of his novel Now It Can Be Told. This was the wide-open beaver book which Dwayne Hoover would soon take so seriously.

So there the three of us were. Dwayne and Trout and I could have been included in an equilateral triangle about twelve feet on a side.

As three unwavering bands of light, we were simple and separate and beautiful. As machines, we were flabby bags of ancient plumbing and wiring, of rusty hinges and feeble springs. And our interrelationships were Byzantine.

After all, I had created both Dwayne and Trout, and now Trout was about to drive Dwayne into full-blown insanity, and Dwayne would soon bite off the tip of Trout’s finger.

Wayne Hoobler was watching us through a peephole in the kitchen. There was a tap on his shoulder. The man who had fed him now told him to leave.

So he wandered outdoors, and he found himself among Dwayne’s used cars again. He resumed his conversation with the traffic on the Interstate.

The bartender in the cocktail lounge now flicked on the ultraviolet lights in the ceiling. Bonnie MacMahon’s uniform, since it was impregnated with fluorescent materials, lit up like an electric sign.

So did the bartender’s jacket and the African masks on the walls.

So did Dwayne Hoover’s shirt, and the shirts of several other men.

The reason was this: Those shirts had been laundered in washday products which contained fluorescent materials. The idea was to make clothes look brighter in sunlight by making them actually fluorescent.

When the same clothes were viewed in a dark room under ultraviolet light, however, they became ridiculously bright.

Bunny Hoover’s teeth also lit up, since he used a toothpaste containing fluorescent materials, which was supposed to make his smile look brighter in daylight. He grinned now, and he appeared to have a mouthful of little Christmas tree lights.

But the brightest new light in the room by far was the bosom of Kilgore Trout’s new evening shirt. Its brilliance twinkled and had depth. It might have been the top of a slumping, open sack of radioactive diamonds.

But then Trout hunched forward involuntarily, buckling the starched shirt bosom, forming it into a parabolic dish. This made a searchlight of the shirt. Its beam was aimed at Dwayne Hoover.

The sudden light roused Dwayne from his trance. He thought perhaps he had died. At any rate, something painless and supernatural was going on. Dwayne smiled trustingly at the holy light. He was ready for anything.

Trout had no explanation for the fantastic transformation of certain garments around the room. Like most science-fiction writers, he knew almost nothing about science. He had no more use for solid information than did Rabo Karabekian. So now he could only be flabbergasted.

My own shirt, being an old one which had been washed many times in a Chinese laundry which used ordinary soap, did not fluoresce.

Dwayne Hoover now lost himself in the bosom of Trout’s shirt, just as he had earlier lost himself in twinkling beads of lemon oil. He remembered now a thing his stepfather had told him when he was only ten years old, which was this: Why there were no Niggers in Shepherdstown.

This was not a completely irrelevant recollection. Dwayne had, after all, been talking to Bonnie MacMahon, whose husband had lost so much money in a car wash in Shepherdstown. And the main reason the car wash had failed was that successful car washes needed cheap and plentiful labor, which meant black labor—and there were no Niggers in Shepherdstown.

“Years ago,” Dwayne’s stepfather told Dwayne when Dwayne was ten, “Niggers was coming up north by the millions—to Chicago, to Midland City, to Indianapolis, to Detroit. The World War was going on. There was such a labor shortage that even Niggers who couldn’t read or write could get good factory jobs. Niggers had money like they never had before.

“Over at Shepherdstown, though,” he went on, “the white people got smart quick. They didn’t want Niggers in their town, so they put up signs on the main roads at the city limits and in the railroad yard." Dwayne’s stepfather described the signs, which looked like this:

“One night—" Dwayne’s stepfather said, “a Nigger family got off a boxcar in Shepherdstown. Maybe they didn’t see the sign. Maybe they couldn’t read it. Maybe they couldn’t believe it." Dwayne’s stepfather was out of work when he told the story so gleefully. The Great Depression had just begun. He and Dwayne were on a weekly expedition in the family car, hauling garbage and trash out into the country, where they dumped it all in Sugar Creek.

“Anyway, they moved into an empty shack that night," Dwayne’s stepfather went on. “They got a fire going in the stove and all. So a mob went down there at midnight. They took out the man, and they sawed him in two on the top strand of a barbed-wire fence." Dwayne remembered clearly that a rainbow of oil from the trash was spreading prettily over the surface of Sugar Creek when he heard that.

“Since that night, which was a long time ago now," his stepfather said, “there ain’t been a Nigger even spend the night in Shepherdstown.

Trout was itchingly aware that Dwayne was staring at his bosom so loonily. Dwayne’s eyes swam, and Trout supposed they were swimming in alcohol. He could not know that Dwayne was seeing an oil slick on Sugar Creek which had made rainbows forty long years ago.

Trout was aware of me, too, what little he could see of me. I made him even more uneasy than Dwayne did. The thing was: Trout was the only character I ever created who had enough imagination to suspect that he might be the creation of another human being. He had spoken of this possibility several times to his parakeet. He had said, for instance, “Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I’m a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time.”

Now Trout was beginning to catch on that he was sitting very close to the person who had created him. He was embarrassed. It was hard for him to know how to respond, particularly since his responses were going to be anything I said they were.

I went easy on him, didn’t wave, didn’t stare. I kept my glasses on. I wrote again on my tabletop, scrawled the symbols for the interrelationship between matter and energy as it was understood in my day:

It was a flawed equation, as far as I was concerned. There should have been an “A” in there somewhere for Awareness—without which the “E” and the “M” and the “c,” which was a mathematical constant; could not exist.

All of us were stuck to the surface of a ball, incidentally. The planet was ball-shaped. Nobody knew why we didn’t fall off, even though everybody pretended to kind of understand it.

The really smart people understood that one of the best ways to get rich was to own a part of the surface people had to stick to.

Trout dreaded eye contact with either Dwayne or me, so he went through the contents of the manila envelope which had been waiting for him in his suite.

The first thing he examined was a letter from Fred T. Barry, the Chairman of the Festival of the Arts, the donor of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts, and the founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Barrytron, Ltd.

Clipped to the letter was one share of common stock in Barrytron, made out in the name of Kilgore Trout. Here was the letter:

“Dear Mr. Trout:” it said, “It is a pleasure and an honor to have such a distinguished and creative person give his precious time to Midland City’s first Festival of the Arts. It is our wish that you feel like a member of our family while you are here. To give you and other distinguished visitors a deeper sense of participation in the life of our community, I am making a gift to each of you of one share in the company which I founded, the company of which I am now Chairman of the Board. It is not only my company now, but yours as well.

“Our company began as The Robo-Magic Corporation of America in 1934. It had three employees in the beginning, and its mission was to design and manufacture the first fully automatic washing machine for use in the home. You will find the motto of that washing machine on the corporate emblem at the top of the stock certificate.”

The emblem consisted of a Greek goddess on an ornate chaise longue. She held a flagstaff from which a long pennant streamed. Here is what the pennant said:

The motto of the old Robo-Magic washing machine cleverly confused two separate ideas people had about Monday. One idea was that women traditionally did their laundry Monday. Monday was simply washday, and not an especially depressing day on that account.

People who had horrible jobs during the week used to Monday “Blue Monday" sometimes, though, because they hated to return to work after a day of rest. When Fred T. Barry made up the Robo-Magic motto as a young man, he pretended that Monday was called “Blue Monday" because doing the laundry disgusted and exhausted women.

The Robo-Magic was going to cheer them up.

It wasn’t true, incidentally, that most women did their laundry on Monday at the time the Robo-Magic was invented. They did it any time they felt like it. One of Dwayne Hoover’s clearest recollections from the Great Depression, for instance, was when his stepmother decided to do the laundry Christmas Eve. She was bitter about the low estate to which the family had fallen, and she suddenly clumped down into the basement, down among the black beetles and the millipedes, and did the laundry.

“Time to do the Nigger work," she said.

Fred T. Barry began advertising the Robo-Magic in 1933, long before there was a reliable machine to sell. And he was one of the few persons in Midland City who could afford billboard advertising during the Great Depression, so the Robo-Magic sales message did not have to jostle and shriek for attention. It was practically the only symbol in town.

One of Fred’s ads was on a billboard outside the main gate of the defunct Keedsler Automobile Company, which the Robo-Magic Corporation had taken over. It showed a high society woman in a fur coat and pearls. She was leaving her mansion for a pleasant afternoon of idleness, and a balloon was coming out of her mouth. These were the words in the balloon:

Another ad, which was painted on a billboard by the railroad depot, showed two white deliverymen who were bringing a Robo-Magic into a house. A black maid was watching them. Her eyes were popping out in a comical way. There was a balloon coming out of her mouth, too, and she was saying this:

Fred T. Barry wrote these ads himself, and he predicted at the time that Robo-Magic appliances of various sorts would eventually do what he called “all the Nigger work of the world,” which was lifting and cleaning and cooking and washing and ironing and tending children and dealing with filth.

Dwayne Hoover’s stepmother wasn’t the only white woman who was a terrible sport about doing work like that. My own mother was that way, too, and so was my sister, may she rest in peace. They both flatly refused to do Nigger work.

The white men wouldn’t do it either, of course. They called it women’s work, and the women called it Nigger work.

I am going to make a wild guess now: I think that the end of the Civil War in my country frustrated the white people in the North, who won it, in a way which has never been acknowledged before. Their descendants inherited that frustration, I think, without ever knowing what it was.

The victors in that war were cheated out of the most desirable spoils of that war, which were human slaves.

The Robo-Magic dream was interrupted by World War Two. The old Keedsler Automobile Works became an armory instead of an appliance factory. Al that survived of the Robo-Magic itself was its brain, which had told the rest of the machine when to let the water in, when to let the water out, when to slosh, when to rinse, when to spin dry, and so on.

That brain became the nerve center of the so-called “BLINC System” during the Second World War. It was installed on heavy bombers, and it did the actual dropping of bombs after a bombardier pressed his bright red “bombs away” button. The button activated the BLINC System, which then released the bombs in such a way as to achieve a desired pattern of explosions on the planet below. “BLINC” was an abbreviation of “Blast Interval Normalization Computer.”