Breakfast of Champions Page 0,43

according to Kilgore Trout.

The bear was attempting to get a line on why The Man did what he did. He would ask, for instance, “Why did you yell, ‘Cheese’?”

And The Man would tell him mockingly, “Because I felt like it, you stupid machine.”

• • •

Here is what The Man’s tombstone on the virgin planet looked like at the end of the book by Kilgore Trout:

17

BUNNY HOOVER, Dwayne’s homosexual son, was dressing for work now. He was the piano player in the cocktail lounge of the new Holiday Inn. He was poor. He lived alone in a room without bath in the old Fairchild Hotel, which used to be fashionable. It was a flophouse now—in the most dangerous part of Midland City.

Very soon, Bunny Hoover would be seriously injured by Dwayne, would soon share an ambulance with Kilgore Trout.

• • •

Bunny was pale, the same unhealthy color of the blind fish that used to live in the bowels of Sacred Miracle Cave. Those fish were extinct. They had all turned belly-up years ago, had been flushed from the cave and into the Ohio River—to turn belly-up, to go bang in the noonday sun.

Bunny avoided the sunshine, too. And the water from the taps of Midland City was becoming more poisonous every day. He ate very little. He prepared his own food in his room. The preparation was simple, since vegetables and fruits were all he ate, and he munched them raw.

He not only did without dead meat—he did without living meat, too, without friends or lovers or pets. He had once been highly popular. When he was at Prairie Military Academy, for instance, the student body was unanimous in electing him Cadet Colonel, the highest rank possible, in his senior year.

• • •

When Bunny played the piano bar at the Holiday Inn, he had many, many secrets. One of them was this: he wasn’t really there. He was able to absent himself from the cocktail lounge, and from the planet itself, for that matter, by means of Transcendental Meditation. He learned this technique from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who once stopped off in Midland City during a world-wide lecture tour.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in exchange for a new handkerchief, a piece of fruit, a bunch of flowers, and thirty-five dollars, taught Bunny to close his eyes, and to say this euphonious nonsense word to himself over and over again: “Aye-eeeeem, aye-eeeeem, aye-eeeeem.” Bunny sat on the edge of his bed in the hotel room now, and he did it. “Aye-eeeeem, aye-eeeeem”, he said to himself—internally. The rhythm of the chant matched one syllable with each two beats in his heart. He closed his eyes. He became a skin diver in the depths of his mind. The depths were seldom used.

His heart slowed. His respiration nearly stopped. A single word floated by in the depths. It had somehow escaped from the busier parts of his mind. It wasn’t connected to anything. It floated by lazily, a translucent, scarf-like fish. The word was untroubling. Here was the word: “Blue.” Here is what it looked like to Bunny Hoover:

And then another lovely scarf swam by. It looked like this:

• • •

Fifteen minutes later, Bunny’s awareness bobbed to the surface of its own accord. Bunny was refreshed. He got up from the bed, and he brushed his hair with the military brushes his mother had given him when he was elected Cadet Colonel so long ago.

• • •

Bunny was sent away to military school, an institution devoted to homicide and absolutely humorless obedience, when he was only ten years old. Here is why: He told Dwayne that he wished he were a woman instead of a man, because what men did was so often cruel and ugly.

• • •

Listen: Bunny Hoover went to Prairie Military Academy for eight years of uninterrupted sports, buggery and Fascism. Buggery consisted of sticking one’s penis in somebody else’s asshole or mouth, or having it done to one by somebody else. Fascism was a fairly popular political philosophy which made sacred whatever nation and race the philosopher happened to belong to. It called for an autocratic, centralized government, headed up by a dictator. The dictator had to be obeyed, no matter what he told somebody to do.

And Bunny would bring new medals with him every time he came home for vacation. He could fence and box and wrestle and swim, he could shoot a rifle and a pistol, fight with bayonets, ride a horse, creep and crawl through shrubbery, peek around corners