Breakfast of Champions Page 0,48

of the new Holiday Inn—because of a fatal accident on Exit 10A. Drivers and passengers got out of their cars—to stretch their legs and find out, if they could, what the trouble was up ahead.

Kilgore Trout was among those who got out. He learned from others that the new Holiday Inn was within easy walking distance. So he gathered up his parcels from the front seat of the Galaxie. He thanked the driver, whose name he had forgotten, and he began to trudge.

He also began to assemble in his mind a system of beliefs which would be appropriate to his narrow mission in Midland City, which was to show provincials, who were bent on exalting creativity, a would-be creator who had failed and failed. He paused in his trudge to examine himself in the rearview mirror, the rearview leak, of a truck locked up in traffic. The tractor was pulling two trailers instead of one. Here was the message the owners of the rig saw fit to shriek at human beings wherever it went:

Trout’s image in the leak was as shocking as he had hoped it would be. He had not washed up after his drubbing by The Pluto Gang, so there was caked blood on one earlobe, and more under his left nostril. There was dog shit on a shoulder of his coat. He had collapsed into dog shit on the handball court under the Queensboro Bridge after the robbery.

By an unbelievable coincidence, that shit came from the wretched greyhound belonging to a girl I knew.

• • •

The girl with the greyhound was an assistant lighting director for a musical comedy about American history, and she kept her poor greyhound, who was named Lancer, in a one-room apartment fourteen feet wide and twenty-six feet long, and six flights of stairs above street level. His entire life was devoted to unloading his excrement at the proper time and place. There were two proper places to put it: in the gutter outside the door seventy-two steps below, with the traffic whizzing by, or in a roasting pan his mistress kept in front of the Westinghouse refrigerator.

Lancer had a very small brain, but he must have suspected from time to time, just as Wayne Hoobler did, that some kind of terrible mistake had been made.

• • •

Trout trudged onward, a stranger in a strange land. His pilgrimage was rewarded with new wisdom, which would never have been his had he remained in his basement in Cohoes. He learned the answer to a question many human beings were asking themselves so frantically: “What’s blocking traffic on the westbound barrel of the Midland City stretch of the Interstate?”

The scales fell from the eyes of Kilgore Trout. He saw the explanation: a Queen of the Prairies milk truck was lying on its side, blocking the flow. It had been hit hard by a ferocious 1971 Chevrolet Caprice two-door. The Chevy had jumped the median divider strip. The Chevy’s passenger hadn’t used his seat belt. He had shot right through the shatterproof windshield. He was lying dead now in the concrete trough containing Sugar Creek. The Chevy’s driver was also dead. He had been skewered by the post of his steering wheel.

The Chevy’s passenger was bleeding blood as he lay dead in Sugar Creek. The milk truck was bleeding milk. Milk and blood were about to be added to the composition of the stinking ping-pong balls which were being manufactured in the bowels of Sacred Miracle Cave.

19

I WAS ON A PAR with the Creator of the Universe there in the dark in the cocktail lounge. I shrunk the Universe to a ball exactly one light-year in diameter. I had it explode. I had it disperse itself again.

Ask me a question, any question. How old is the Universe? It is one half-second old, but that half-second has lasted one quintillion years so far. Who created it? Nobody created it. It has always been here.

What is time? It is a serpent which eats its tail, like this:

This is the snake which uncoiled itself long enough to offer Eve the apple, which looked like this:

What was the apple which Eve and Adam ate? It was the Creator of the Universe.

And so on.

Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.

• • •

Listen:

The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn’t let her. “Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?” she asked me.

“The big show is inside my head,” I said.

“Oh,” she