Trinity

So It Goes April 11, 2009

Billy was in the meat-locker the night Dresden was destroyed.  The walls shook and dust sprinkled down on the prisoners, but Billy wasn’t there anymore.  He was in the hospital listening as the esteemed professor Bertram Copeland Rumfoord read a press release to an illiterate wallflower.  Billy heard about a bomb that had leveled a city in Japan and ended a war.  Billy knew that it was the same war that he had been in, but the idea of waging war across a world didn’t make sense when Roland Weary died walking to the next town.  Besides, if the President wanted to level a city and end the war, Billy couldn’t understand dropping one bomb to destroy the city when the giants of Dresden could knock them all the way to Tralfamadore.  Billy rolled over in his hospital bed and was in another.

In 1945, Eliot Rosewater was telling Billy about his favorite author, Kilgore Trout.  Kilgore Trout wrote books about robots and aliens and Jesus and the fourth dimension.  Billy remembered a little dirty bookstore in 1968 New York, where he flipped through a book he had read before (with Eliot Rosewater) about a man and a woman who were put on display in a zoo.  The store had pictures of Montana Wildhack in the back, but Billy ignored these—he had the real thing in the zoo on Tralfamadore—all he had to do was a little fourth-dimensional traveling to see her and the baby.  Billy remembered being friends with Kilgore Trout in 1964—maybe he should tell him about Tralfamadore.  Maybe that’s what made him write the book Billy read in 1945.  Or maybe Billy should take the secret of Tralfamadore with him to Chicago on February 13th, 1976.

After Billy experienced death for a while, he swung back into life.  He stopped halfway back, in the hospital in Vermont.  Robert was there, talking to the doctor.  Billy supposed he should talk to Robert, but all he could think about was robots with bad breath dropping giants on the moon.  He wasn’t sure what that had to do with Robert, so he visited 1964 to ask Kilgore Trout.  Kilgore Trout knew all about robots and bad breath.  Bad breath like mustard gas and roses—or gasoline and rubber.

The Tralfamadorians told Billy that they didn’t watch wars.  The walls in the shelter were shaking.  When one of the soldiers checked outside, the smell came in—like robot halitosis—and one of the prisoners throw up everything he had eaten during that month in Dresden.  That was I.  That was me.  That was the author of this book.  Billy traveled to his honeymoon.  He didn’t tell his wife, but he knew that they—along with five other people—were conceiving Robert, who Billy remembered was a Green Beret.  Robert was back from Vietnam to see Billy in the hospital.  Professor Rumfoord was telling Lily about weapons in Vietnam, things that burned and melted and killed every living thing.  Billy didn’t think that made sense—if everything was dead, there wouldn’t be any birds to tell about it.

“Poo-tee-weet?”