Cat's Cradle

My favorite writer is the Midwest's own Kurt Vonnegut, born in 1922 in Indianapolis and reigning over Manhattan today. His books are funny, heartbreaking, and philosophical, they address the whole of the human soul, and a half dozen of them are to my mind perfect.

He has a post-Hemingway prose style but his voice is uniquely his own, one of the few writers you can read a random paragraph of and instantly identify. No one chooses words like the mighty KV. This from his 1963 classic (title above), and the chapter Secret Agent X-9:

Dr. Breed made an appointment with me for early the next morning. He would pick me up at my hotel on his way to work, he said, thus simplifying my entry into the heavily-guarded Research Labratory.

So I had a night to kill in Ilium. I was already in the beginning and end of night life in Ilium, the Del Prado Hotel. Its bar, the Cape Cod Room, was a hangout for whores.

As it happened--"as it was meant to happen," Bokonon would say--the whore next to me at the bar and the bartender serving me had both gone to high school with Franklin Hoenikker, the bug tormentor, the middle child, the missing son.

The whore, who said her name was Sandra, offered me delights unobtainable outside of Place Pigalle and Port Said. I said I wasn't interested, and she was bright enough to say that she wasn't really interested either. As things turned out, we had both overestimated our apathies, but not by much.

Before we took the measure of each other's passions, however, we talked about Frank Hoenikker, and we talked about the old man, and we talked a little about Asa Breed, and we talked about the General Forge and Foundry Company, and we talked about the Pope and birth control, about Hitler and the Jews...

The bartender was very nice to Sandra. He liked her. He respected her. He told me that Sandra had been chairman of the Class Colors Committee at Ilium High. Every class, he explained, got to pick distinctive colors for itself in its junior year, and then it got to wear those colors with pride.

"What colors did you pick?" I asked.

"Orange and black."

"Those are good colors."

"I thought so."