"Reality is a funny thing. There are no defenses against it except madness."
"David W. Elliott was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1939. By the age of thirteen he had lived with some fifteen different families. At that time he decided to run away from the first month of the tenth grade and the fifteenth family to see the world. He did.
Mr. Elliott now lives in a small town in New York State about fifty miles north of New York City."
"They should put all the nuts in the world in front of a firing squad, he says.
But who would be left to pull the triggers, I say."
Under morphine, Billy had a dream of giraffes in a garden. The giraffes were following gravel paths, were pausing to munch sugar pears from treetops. Billy was a giraffe, too. He ate a pear. It was a hard one. It fought back against his grinding teeth. It snapped in juicy protest.
The giraffes accepted Billy as one of their own, as a harmless creature as preposterously specialized as themselves. Two approached him from opposite sides, leaned against him. They had long, muscular upper lips which they could shape like the bells of bugles. They kissed him with these. They were female giraffes--cream and lemon yellow. They had horns like doorknobs. The knobs were covered with velvet.
Why?
Billy Pilgrim opened his eyes in the hospital in Vermont, did not know where he was. Watching him was his son Robert. Robert was wearing the uniform of the famous Green Berets. Robert's hair was short, was wheat-colored bristles. Robert was clean and neat. He was decorated with a Purple Heart and a Silver Star and a Bronze Star with two clusters.
This was a boy who had flunked out of high school, who had been an alcoholic at sixteen, who had run with a rotten bunch of kids, who had been arrested for tipping over hundreds of tombstones in a Catholic cemetery one time. He was all straightened out now. His posture was wonderful and his shoes were shined and his trousers were pressed, and he was a leader of men.
"Dad--?"
Billy Pilgrim closed his eyes again.
Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.
And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.
My father died many years ago now--of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.
History repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce.
A dream. Of course it was all a dream. Except she's standing in the middle of an infinite white plain, beneath a sky the color of a high-def video monitor sucking signal from a dead channel (saturated electric blue), and the plain is featureless in all directions save for a black hexagonal mesh grid--a tabletop strategy game for retarded superbeings.
Hyperspace bypasses, Vogon poetry, the heat death of the universe: none of these things feature in the extraordinary situation now pertaining to the end of the world as Huw knows it.
