Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction Read online

  Then I took to teaching creative writing, first at Iowa, then at Harvard, and then at City College in New York. Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, was teaching at City College also. He said to me that if it hadn’t been for the war, he would have been in the dry-cleaning business. I said to him that if it hadn’t been for the war, I would have been garden editor of The Indianapolis Star.

  Now lend me your ears. Here is Creative Writing 101:

  1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

  2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

  3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

  4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

  5. Start as close to the end as possible.

  6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

  7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

  8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

  The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

  Ms. O’Connor may or may not have broken my seventh rule, “Write to please just one person.” There is no way for us to find out for sure, unless, of course, there is a Heaven after all, and she’s there, and the rest of us are going there, and we can ask her.

  I’m almost sure she didn’t break rule seven. The late American psychiatrist Dr. Edmund Bergler, who claimed to have treated more professional writers than any other shrink, said in his book The Writer and Psychoanalysis that most writers in his experience wrote to please one person they knew well, even if they didn’t realize they were doing that. It wasn’t a trick of the fiction trade. It was simply a natural human thing to do, whether or not it could make a story better.

  Dr. Bergler said it commonly required psychoanalysis before his patients could know for whom they had been writing. But as soon as I finished his book, and then thought for only a couple of minutes, I knew it was my sister Allie I had been writing for. She is the person the stories in this book were written for. Anything I knew Allie wouldn’t like I crossed out. Everything I knew she would get a kick out of I left in.

  Allie is up in Heaven now, with my first wife Jane and Sam Lawrence and Flannery O’Connor and Dr. Bergler, but I still write to please her. Allie was funny in real life. That gives me permission to be funny, too. Allie and I were very close.

  In my opinion, a story written for one person pleases a reader, dear reader, because it makes him or her a part of the action. It makes the reader feel, even though he or she doesn’t know it, as though he or she is eavesdropping on a fascinating conversation between two people at the next table, say, in a restaurant.

  That’s my educated guess.

  Here is another: A reader likes a story written for just one person because the reader can sense, again without knowing it, that the story has boundaries like a playing field. The story can’t go simply anywhere. This, I feel, invites readers to come off the sidelines, to get into the game with the author. Where is the story going next? Where should it go? No fair! Hopeless situation! Touchdown!

  Remember my rule number eight? “Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible”? That’s so they can play along. Where, outside the Groves of Academe, does anybody like a story where so much information is withheld or arcane that there is no way for readers to play along?

  The boundaries to the playing fields of my short stories, and my novels, too, were once the boundaries of the soul of my only sister. She lives on that way.

  Amen.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Thanasphere

  At noon, Wednesday, July 26th, windowpanes in the small mountain towns of Sevier County, Tennessee, were rattled by the shock and faint thunder of a distant explosion rolling down the northwest slopes of the Great Smokies. The explosion came from the general direction of the closely guarded Air Force experimental station in the forest ten miles northwest of Elkmont.

  Said the Air Force Office of Public Information, “No comment.”

  That evening, amateur astronomers in Omaha, Nebraska, and Glenwood, Iowa, reported independently that a speck had crossed the face of the full moon at 9:57 p.m. There was a flurry of excitement on the news wires. Astronomers at the major North American observatories denied that they had seen it.

  They lied.

  In Boston, on the morning of Thursday, July 27th, an enterprising newsman sought out Dr. Bernard Groszinger, youthful rocket consultant for the Air Force. “Is it possible that what crossed the moon was a spaceship?” the newsman asked.

  Dr. Groszinger laughed at the question. “My own opinion is that we’re beginning another cycle of flying-saucer scares,” he said. “This time everyone’s seeing spaceships between us and the moon. You can tell your readers this, my friend: No rocket ship will leave the earth for at least another twenty years.”

  He lied.

  He knew a great deal more than he was saying, but somewhat less than he himself thought. He did not believe in ghosts, for instance—and had yet to learn of the Thanasphere.

  Dr. Groszinger rested his long legs on his cluttered desktop, and watched his secretary conduct the disappointed newsman through the locked door, past the armed guards. He lit a cigarette and tried to relax before going back into the stale air and tension of the radio room. IS YOUR SAFE LOCKED? asked a sign on the wall, tacked there by a diligent security officer. The sign annoyed him. Security officers, security regulations only served to slow his work, to make him think about things he had no time to think about.

  The secret papers in the safe weren’t secrets. They said what had been known for centuries: Given fundamental physics, it follows that a projectile fired into space in direction x, at y miles per hour, will travel in the arc z. Dr. Groszinger modified the equation: Given fundamental physics and one billion dollars.

  Impending war had offered him the opportunity to try the experiment. The threat of war was an incident, the military men about him an irritating condition of work—the experiment was the heart of the matter.

  There were no unknowns, he reflected, finding contentment in the dependability of the physical world. Young Dr. Groszinger smiled, thinking of Christopher Columbus and his crew, who hadn’t known what lay ahead of them, who had been scared stiff by sea monsters that didn’t exist. Maybe the average person of today felt the same way about space. The Age of Superstition still had a few years to run.

  But the man in the spaceship two thousand miles from earth had no unknowns to fear. The sullen Major Allen Rice would have nothing surprising to report in his radio messages. He could only confirm what reason had already revealed about outer space.

  The major American observatories, working closely with the project, reported that the ship was now moving around the earth in the predicted orbit at the predicted velocity. Soon, anytime now, the first message in history from outer space would be received in the radio room. The broadcast could be on an ultra-high-frequency band where no one had ever sent or received messages before.

  The first message was overdue, but nothing had gone wrong—nothing could go wrong, Dr. Groszinger assured himself again. Machines, not men, were guiding the flight. The man was a mere observer, piloted to his lonely vantage point by infallible electronic brains, swifter than his own. He had controls in his ship, but only for gliding down through the atmosphere, when and if they brought him back from space. He was equipped to stay for several years.

  Ev
en the man was as much like a machine as possible, Dr. Groszinger thought with satisfaction. He was quick, strong, unemotional. Psychiatrists had picked Major Rice from a hundred volunteers, and predicted that he would function as perfectly as the rocket motors, the metal hull, and the electronic controls. His specifications: Husky, twenty-nine years of age, fifty-five missions over Europe during the Second World War without a sign of fatigue, a childless widower, melancholy and solitary, a career soldier, a demon for work.

  The Major’s mission? Simple: To report weather conditions over enemy territory, and to observe the accuracy of guided atomic missiles in the event of war.

  Major Rice was fixed in the solar system, two thousand miles above the earth now—close by, really—the distance from New York to Salt Lake City, not far enough away to see much of the polar icecaps, even. With a telescope, Rice could pick out small towns and the wakes of ships without much trouble. It would be breathtaking to watch the enormous blue-and-green ball, to see night creeping around it, and clouds and storms growing and swirling over its face.

  Dr. Groszinger tamped out his cigarette, absently lit another almost at once, and strode down the corridor to the small laboratory where the radio equipment had been set up.

  Lieutenant General Franklin Dane, head of Project Cyclops, sat next to the radio operator, his uniform rumpled, his collar open. The General stared expectantly at the loudspeaker before him. The floor was littered with sandwich wrappings and cigarette butts. Coffee-filled paper cups stood before the General and the radio operator, and beside the canvas chair where Groszinger had spent the night waiting.

  General Dane nodded to Groszinger and motioned with his hand for silence.

  “Able Baker Fox, this is Dog Easy Charley. Able Baker Fox, this is Dog Easy Charley …” droned the radio operator wearily, using the code names. “Can you hear me, Able Baker Fox? Can you—”

  The loudspeaker crackled, then, tuned to its peak volume, boomed: “This is Able Baker Fox. Come in, Dog Easy Charley. Over.”

  General Dane jumped to his feet and embraced Groszinger. They laughed idiotically and pounded each other on the back. The General snatched the microphone from the radio operator. “You made it. Able Baker Fox! Right on course! What’s it like, boy? What’s it feel like? Over.” Groszinger, his arm draped around the General’s shoulders, leaned forward eagerly, his ear a few inches from the speaker. The radio operator turned the volume down, so that they could hear something of the quality of Major Rice’s voice.

  The voice came through again, soft, hesitant. The tone disturbed Groszinger—he had wanted it to be crisp, sharp, efficient.

  “This side of the earth’s dark, very dark just now. And I feel like I’m falling—the way you said I would. Over.”

  “Is anything the matter?” asked the General anxiously. “You sound as though something—”

  The Major cut in before he could finish: “There! Did you hear that?”

  “Able Baker Fox, we can’t hear anything,” said the General, looking perplexed at Groszinger. “What is it—some kind of noise in your receiver? Over.”

  “A child,” said the Major. “I hear a child crying. Don’t you hear it? And now—listen!—now an old man is trying to comfort it.” His voice seemed farther away, as though he were no longer speaking directly into his microphone.

  “That’s impossible, ridiculous!” said Groszinger. “Check your set, Able Baker Fox, check your set. Over.”

  “They’re getting louder now. The voices are louder. I can’t hear you very well above them. It’s like standing in the middle of a crowd, with everybody trying to get my attention at once. It’s like …” The message trailed off. They could hear a shushing sound in the speaker. The Major’s transmitter was still on.

  “Can you hear me, Able Baker Fox? Answer! Can you hear me?” called General Dane.

  The shushing noise stopped. The General and Groszinger stared blankly at the speaker.

  “Able Baker Fox, this is Dog Easy Charley,” chanted the radio operator. “Able Baker Fox, this is Dog Easy Charley….”

  Groszinger, his eyes shielded from the glaring ceiling light of the radio room by a newspaper, lay fully dressed on the cot that had been brought in for him. Every few minutes he ran his long, slender fingers through his tangled hair and swore. His machine had worked perfectly, was working perfectly. The one thing he had not designed, the damn man in it, had failed, had destroyed the whole experiment.

  They had been trying for six hours to reestablish contact with the lunatic who peered down at earth from his tiny steel moon and heard voices.

  “He’s coming in again, sir,” said the radio operator. “This is Dog Easy Charley. Come in, Able Baker Fox. Over.”

  “This is Able Baker Fox. Clear weather over Zones Seven, Eleven, Nineteen, and Twenty-three. Zones One, Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six overcast. Storm seems to be shaping up over Zones Eight and Nine, moving south by southwest at about eighteen miles an hour. Over.”

  “He’s OK now,” said the General, relieved.

  Groszinger remained supine, his head still covered with the newspaper. “Ask him about the voices,” he said.

  “You don’t hear the voices anymore, do you, Able Baker Fox?”

  “What do you mean, I don’t hear them? I can hear them better than I can hear you. Over.”

  “He’s out of his head,” said Groszinger, sitting up.

  “I heard that,” said Major Rice. “Maybe I am. It shouldn’t be too hard to check. All you have to do is find out if an Andrew Tobin died in Evansville, Indiana, on February 17, 1927. Over.”

  “I don’t follow you, Able Baker Fox,” said the General. “Who was Andrew Tobin? Over.”

  “He’s one of the voices.” There was an uncomfortable pause. Major Rice cleared his throat. “Claims his brother murdered him. Over.”

  The radio operator had risen slowly from his stool, his face chalk-white. Groszinger pushed him back down and took the microphone from the General’s now limp hand.

  “Either you’ve lost your mind, or this is the most sophomoric practical joke in history, Able Baker Fox,” said Groszinger. “This is Groszinger you’re talking to, and you’re dumber than I think you are if you think you can kid me.” He nodded. “Over.”

  “I can’t hear you very well anymore, Dog Easy Charley. Sorry, but the voices are getting louder.”

  “Rice! Straighten out!” said Groszinger.

  “There—I caught that: Mrs. Pamela Ritter wants her husband to marry again, for the sake of the children. He lives at—”

  “Stop it!”

  “He lives at 1577 Damon Place, in Scotia, New York. Over and out.”

  General Dane shook Groszinger’s shoulder gently. “You’ve been asleep five hours,” he said. “It’s midnight.” He handed him a cup of coffee. “We’ve got some more messages. Interested?”

  Groszinger sipped the coffee. “Is he still raving?”

  “He still hears the voices, if that’s what you mean.” The General dropped two unopened telegrams in Groszinger’s lap. “Thought you might like to be the one to open these.”

  Groszinger laughed. “Went ahead and checked Scotia and Evansville, did you? God help this army, if all the generals are as superstitious as you, my friend.”

  “OK, OK, you’re the scientist, you’re the brain-box. That’s why I want you to open the telegrams. I want you to tell me what in hell’s going on.”

  Groszinger opened one of the telegrams.

  HARVEY RITTER LISTED FOR 1577 DAMON PLACE, SCOTIA. GE ENGINEER. WIDOWER, TWO CHILDREN. DECEASED WIFE NAMED PAMELA. DO YOU NEED MORE INFORMATION? R. B. FAILEY, CHIEF, SCOTIA POLICE

  He shrugged and handed the message to General Dane, then opened the other telegram:

  RECORDS SHOW ANDREW TOBIN DIED IN HUNTING ACCIDENT FEBRUARY 17, 1927. BROTHER PAUL LEADING BUSINESSMAN. OWNS COAL BUSINESS STARTED BY ANDREW. CAN FURNISH FURTHER DETAILS IF NEEDED. F. B. JOHNSON, CHIEF, EVANSVILLE P.D.

  “I’m not surprised,”
said Groszinger. “I expected something like this. I suppose you’re firmly convinced now that our friend Major Rice has found outer space populated by ghosts?”

  “Well, I’d say he’s sure as hell found it populated by something,” said the General.

  Groszinger wadded the second telegram in his fist and threw it across the room, missing the wastebasket by a foot. He folded his hands and affected the patient, priestlike pose he used in lecturing freshman physics classes. “At first, my friend, we had two possible conclusions: Either Major Rice was insane, or he was pulling off a spectacular hoax.” He twiddled his thumbs, waiting for the General to digest this intelligence. “Now that we know his spirit messages deal with real people, we’ve got to conclude that he has planned and is now carrying out some sort of hoax. He got his names and addresses before he took off. God knows what he hopes to accomplish by it. God knows what we can do to make him stop it. That’s your problem, I’d say.”

  The General’s eyes narrowed. “So he’s trying to jimmy the project, is he? We’ll see, by God, we’ll see.” The radio operator was dozing. The General slapped him on the back. “On the ball, Sergeant, on the ball. Keep calling Rice till you get him, understand?”

  The radio operator had to call only once.

  “This is Able Baker Fox. Come in, Dog Easy Charley.” Major Rice’s voice was tired.

  “This is Dog Easy Charley,” said General Dane. “We’ve had enough of your voices, Able Baker Fox—do you understand? We don’t want to hear any more about them. We’re onto your little game. I don’t know what your angle is, but I do know I’ll bring you back down and slap you on a rock pile in Leaven-worth so fast you’ll leave your teeth up there. Do we understand each other?” The General bit the tip from a fresh cigar fiercely. “Over.”

  “Did you check those names and addresses? Over.”