Breakfast of Champions Page 0,49
said.
“I can tell fortunes,” I said. “You want your fortune told?”
“Not right now,” she said. She went back to the bar, and she and the bartender had some sort of conversation about me, I think. The bartender took several anxious looks in my direction. All he could see were the leaks over my eyes. I did not worry about his asking me to leave the establishment. I had created him, after all. I gave him a name: Harold Newcomb Wilbur. I awarded him the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the Soldier’s Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, and a Purple Heart with two Oak-Leaf Clusters, which made him the second most decorated veteran in Midland City. I put all his medals under his handkerchiefs in a dresser drawer.
He won all those medals in the Second World War, which was staged by robots so that Dwayne Hoover could give a free-willed reaction to such a holocaust. The war was such an extravaganza that there was scarcely a robot anywhere who didn’t have a part to play. Harold Newcomb Wilbur got his medals for killing Japanese, who were yellow robots. They were fueled by rice.
And he went on staring at me, even though I wanted to stop him now. Here was the thing about my control over the characters I created: I could only guide their movements approximately, since they were such big animals. There was inertia to overcome. It wasn’t as though I was connected to them by steel wires. It was more as though I was connected to them by stale rubberbands.
So I made the green telephone in back of the bar ring. Harold Newcomb Wilbur answered it, but he kept his eyes on me. I had to think fast about who was on the other end of the telephone. I put the first most decorated veteran in Midland City on the other end. He had a penis eight hundred miles long and two hundred and ten miles in diameter, but practically all of it was in the fourth dimension. He got his medals in the war in Viet Nam. He had also fought yellow robots who ran on rice.
“Cocktail lounge,” said Harold Newcomb Wilbur.
“Hal—?”
“Yes?”
“This is Ned Lingamon.”
“I’m busy.”
“Don’t hang up. The cops got me down at City Jail. They only let me have one call, so I called you.”
“Why me?”
“You’re the only friend I got left.”
“What they got you in for?”
“They say I killed my baby.”
And so on.
This man, who was white, had all the medals Harold Newcomb Wilbur had, plus the highest decoration for heroism which an American soldier could receive, which looked like this:
He had now also committed the lowest crime which an American could commit, which was to kill his own child. Her name was Cynthia Anne, and she certainly didn’t live very long before she was made dead again. She got killed for crying and crying. She wouldn’t shut up.
First she drove her seventeen-year-old mother away with all her demands, and then her father killed her.
And so on.
• • •
As for the fortune I might have told for the waitress, this was it: “You will be swindled by termite exterminators and not even know it. You will buy steel-belted radial tires for the front wheels of your car. Your cat will be killed by a motorcyclist named Headley Thomas, and you will get another cat. Arthur, your brother in Atlanta, will find eleven dollars in a taxicab.”
• • •
I might have told Bunny Hoover’s fortune, too: “Your father will become extremely ill, and you will respond so grotesquely that there will be talk of putting you in the booby hatch, too. You will stage scenes in the hospital waiting room, telling doctors and nurses that you are to blame for your father’s disease. You will blame yourself for trying for so many years to kill him with hatred. You will redirect your hatred. You will hate your mom.”
And so on.
And I had Wayne Hoobler, the black ex-convict, stand bleakly among the garbage cans outside the back door of the Inn, and examine the currency which had been given to him at the prison gate that morning. He had nothing else to do.
He studied the pyramid with the blazing eye on top. He wished he had more information about the pyramid and the eye. There was so much to learn!
Wayne didn’t even know the Earth revolved around the Sun. He thought the Sun revolved around the Earth, because it certainly looked that way.
A truck sizzled by on