Galapagos Part 14

And I have to laugh now, thinking of what a loss of dignity and beauty it would be if a modern person were, before making love, to equip himself or herself with a typical birth-control device of a million years ago. Imagine, moreover, their having to do that with flippers instead of hands!

Have natural rafts of vegetable matter from anywhere here in my time, with or without pa.s.sengers? No. Have mainland species of any sort reached these islands since the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin was run aground? No. was run aground? No.

Then again, I've only been here for a million years-no time at all, really.

How did I get from Vietnam to Sweden?

After I shot the old woman who had killed my best friend and worst enemy with a hand grenade, and what was left of our platoon burned her village to the ground, I was hospitalized for what was called "nervous exhaustion." I was given tender, loving care. I was also visited by officers who impressed on me how important it was that I not tell anyone what had happened in the village. Only then did I learn that our platoon had killed fifty-nine villagers of all ages. Somebody had counted them afterwards.

While on a pa.s.s from the hospital, I contracted syphilis from a Saigon prost.i.tute while drunk and also high on marijuana. But the first lesion of that disease, another one unknown in the present day, did not appear until I reached Bangkok, Thailand, where I was sent with many others for so-called "Rest and Recreation." This was a euphemism understood by one and all to mean more wh.o.r.es and drugs and alcohol. Prost.i.tution was then a major earner of foreign currency in Thailand, second only to rice.

After that came rubber.

After that came teak.

After that came tin.

I did not want the Marine Corps to know that I had syphilis. If they found out about it, they would dock my pay during the time I was under treatment. The treatment period, moreover, would be tacked on to the year I was supposed to serve in Vietnam.

So I sought the services of a private physician in Bangkok. A fellow Marine there recommended a young Swedish doctor who treated cases like mine, who was doing research at the University of Medical Sciences there.

During my first visit, he questioned me about the war. I found myself telling him about what our platoon had done to the village and villagers. He wanted to know what I had felt, and I replied that the most terrible part of the experience to me was that I hadn't felt much of anything.

"Did you cry afterwards, or have trouble sleeping?" he said.

"No, sir," I said. "In fact, I was hospitalized because all I wanted to do was sleep."

I hadn't come close to crying. Whatever else I was, I wasn't a weeping w.i.l.l.y, a bleeding heart. And I wasn't much for crying even before the Marine Corps made a man out of me. I hadn't even cried when my redheaded, left-handed mother had walked out on Father and me.

But then that Swede found something to say which made me cry like a baby-at last, at last. He was as surprised as I was when I cried and cried.

Here is what he said: "I notice your name is Trout. Is there any chance that you are related to the wonderful science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout?"

This doctor was the only person I ever met outside of Cohoes, New York, who had heard of my father.

I had to come all the way to Bangkok, Thailand, to learn that in the eyes of one person, anyway, my desperately scribbling father had not lived in vain.

The doctor made me cry so much that I had to be sedated. When I woke up on a cot in his office an hour later, he was watching me. We were all alone.

"Feel better now?" he said.

"No," I said. "Or maybe. It's hard to tell."

"I've been thinking about your case while you slept," he said. "There is one very strong medicine I could prescribe, but I leave it up to you whether or not you want to try it. You should be fully aware of its side effects."

I thought he was talking about how resistant syphilis organisms had become to antibiotics, thanks to the Law of Natural Selection. My big brain was wrong again.

He said he had friends who could arrange to get me from Bangkok to Sweden, if I wanted to seek political asylum there.

"But I can't speak Swedish," I said.

"You'll learn," he said. "You'll learn, you'll learn."

Galapagos is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fict.i.tiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fict.i.tiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

BOOKS BY KURT VONNEGUT

Bluebeard

Breakfast of Champions

Cat's Cradle

Deadeye d.i.c.k

Galapagos

G.o.d Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Jailbird

Mother Night

Palm Sunday

Player Piano

The Sirens of t.i.tan

Slapstick

Slaughterhouse-Five

Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons

Welcome to the Monkey House