Breakfast of Champions Page 0,59
builder, wonderingly. “But there was, by God.”
Abe Cohen, the jeweler, said to Karabekian, “If artists would explain more, people would like art more. You realize that?”
And so on.
Trout was feeling spooky. He thought maybe a lot of people were going to greet him as effusively as Milo Maritimo had done, and he had had no experience with celebrations like that. But nobody got in his way. His old friend Anonymity was by his side again, and the two of them chose a table near Dwayne Hoover and me. All he could see of me was the reflection of candle flames in my mirrored glasses, in my leaks.
Dwayne Hoover was still mentally absent from activities in the cocktail lounge. He sat like a lump of nose putty, staring at something long ago and far away.
Dwayne moved his lips as Trout sat down. He was saying this soundlessly, and it had nothing to do with Trout or me: “Goodbye, Blue Monday.”
• • •
Trout had a fat manila envelope with him. Milo Maritimo had given it to him. It contained a program for the Festival of the Arts, a letter of welcome to Trout from Fred T. Barry, the Chairman of the Festival, a timetable of events during the coming week—and some other things.
Trout also carried a copy of his novel Now It Can Be Told. This was the wide-open beaver book which Dwayne Hoover would soon take so seriously.
So there the three of us were. Dwayne and Trout and I could have been included in an equilateral triangle about twelve feet on a side.
As three unwavering bands of light, we were simple and separate and beautiful. As machines, we were flabby bags of ancient plumbing and wiring, of rusty hinges and feeble springs. And our interrelationships were Byzantine.
After all, I had created both Dwayne and Trout, and now Trout was about to drive Dwayne into full-blown insanity, and Dwayne would soon bite off the tip of Trout’s finger.
• • •
Wayne Hoobler was watching us through a peephole in the kitchen. There was a tap on his shoulder. The man who had fed him now told him to leave.
So he wandered outdoors, and he found himself among Dwayne’s used cars again. He resumed his conversation with the traffic on the Interstate.
• • •
The bartender in the cocktail lounge now flicked on the ultraviolet lights in the ceiling. Bonnie MacMahon’s uniform, since it was impregnated with fluorescent materials, lit up like an electric sign.
So did the bartender’s jacket and the African masks on the walls.
So did Dwayne Hoover’s shirt, and the shirts of several other men. The reason was this: Those shirts had been laundered in washday products which contained fluorescent materials. The idea was to make clothes look brighter in sunlight by making them actually fluorescent.
When the same clothes were viewed in a dark room under ultraviolet light, however, they became ridiculously bright.
Bunny Hoover’s teeth also lit up, since he used a toothpaste containing fluorescent materials, which was supposed to make his smile look brighter in daylight. He grinned now, and he appeared to have a mouthful of little Christmas tree lights.
But the brightest new light in the room by far was the bosom of Kilgore Trout’s new evening shirt. Its brilliance twinkled and had depth. It might have been the top of a slumping, open sack of radioactive diamonds.
But then Trout hunched forward involuntarily, buckling the starched shirt bosom, forming it into a parabolic dish. This made a searchlight of the shirt. Its beam was aimed at Dwayne Hoover.
The sudden light roused Dwayne from his trance. He thought perhaps he had died. At any rate, something painless and supernatural was going on. Dwayne smiled trustingly at the holy light. He was ready for anything.
• • •
Trout had no explanation for the fantastic transformation of certain garments around the room. Like most science-fiction writers, he knew almost nothing about science. He had no more use for solid information than did Rabo Karabekian. So now he could only be flabbergasted.
My own shirt, being an old one which had been washed many times in a Chinese laundry which used ordinary soap, did not fluoresce.
Dwayne Hoover now lost himself in the bosom of Trout’s shirt, just as he had earlier lost himself in twinkling beads of lemon oil. He remembered now a thing his stepfather had told him when he was only ten years old, which was this: Why there were no Niggers in Shepherdstown.
This was not a completely irrelevant recollection. Dwayne had, after all, been