Breakfast of Champions

23






DWAYNE HOOVER read on: “You are surrounded by loving machines, hating machines, greedy machines, unselfish machines, brave machines, cowardly machines, truthful machines, lying machines, funny machines, solemn machines,” he read. “Their only purpose is to stir you up in every conceivable way, so the Creator of the Universe can watch your reactions. They can no more feel or reason than grandfather clocks.
“The Creator of the Universe would now like to apologize not only for the capricious, jostling companionship he provided during the test, but for the trashy, stinking condition of the planet itself. The Creator programmed robots to abuse it for millions of years, so it would be a poisonous, festering cheese when you got here. Also, He made sure it would be desperately crowded by programming robots, regardless of their living conditions, to crave sexual intercourse and adore infants more than almost anything.”


Mary Alice Miller, incidentally, the Women’s Breast Stroke Champion of the World and Queen of the Arts Festival, now passed through the cocktail lounge. She made a shortcut to the lobby from the side parking lot, where her father was waiting for her in his avocado 1970 Plymouth Barracuda fastback, which he had bought as a used car from Dwayne. It had a new car guarantee.
Mary Alice’s father, Don Miller, was, among other things, Chairman of the Parole Board at Shepherdstown. It was he who had decided that Wayne Hoobler, lurking among Dwayne’s used cars again, was fit to take his place in society.
Mary Alice went into the lobby to get a crown and scepter for her performance as Queen at the Arts Festival banquet that night. Milo Maritimo, the desk clerk, the gangster’s grandson, had made them with his own two hands. Her eyes were permanently inflamed. They looked like maraschino cherries.
Only one person noticed her sufficiently to comment out loud. He was Abe Cohen, the jeweler. He said this about Mary Alice, despising her sexlessness and innocence and empty mind: “Pure tuna fish!”


Kilgore Trout heard him say that—about pure tuna fish. His mind tried to make sense of it. His mind was swamped with mysteries. He might as well have been Wayne Hoobler, adrift among Dwayne’s used cars during Hawaiian Week.
His feet, which were sheathed in plastic, were meanwhile getting hotter all the time. The heat was painful now. His feet were curling and twisting, begging to be plunged into cold water or waved in the air.
And Dwayne read on about himself and the Creator of the Universe, to wit:
“He also programmed robots to write books and magazines and newspapers for you, and television and radio shows, and stage shows, and films. They wrote songs for you. The Creator of the Universe had them invent hundreds of religions, so you would have plenty to choose among. He had them kill each other by the millions, for this purpose only: that you be amazed. They have committed every possible atrocity and every possible kindness unfeelingly, automatically, inevitably, to get a reaction from Y-O-U.”
This last word was set in extra-large type and had a line all to itself, so it looked like this:




“Every time you went into the library,” said the book, “the Creator of the Universe held His breath. With such a higgledy-piggledy cultural smorgasbord before you, what would you, with your free will, choose?”
“Your parents were fighting machines and self-pitying machines,” said the book. “Your mother was programmed to bawl out your father for being a defective moneymaking machine, and your father was programmed to bawl her out for being a defective housekeeping machine. They were programmed to bawl each other out for being defective loving machines.
“Then your father was programmed to stomp out of the house and slam the door. This automatically turned your mother into a weeping machine. And your father would go down to a tavern where he would get drunk with some other drinking machines. Then all the drinking machines would go to a whorehouse and rent f*cking machines. And then your father would drag himself home to become an apologizing machine. And your mother would become a very slow forgiving machine.”


Dwayne got to his feet now, having wolfed down tens of thousands of words of such solipsistic whimsey in ten minutes or so.
He walked stiffly over to the piano bar. What made him stiff was his awe of his own strength and righteousness. He dared not use his full strength in merely walking, for fear of destroying the new Holiday Inn with footfalls. He did not fear for his own life, Trout’s book assured him that he had already been killed twenty-three times. On each occasion, the Creator of the Universe had patched him up and got him going again.
Dwayne restrained himself in the name of elegance rather than safety. He was going to respond to his new understanding of life with finesse, for an audience of two—himself and his Creator.
He approached his homosexual son.
Bunny saw the trouble coming, supposed it was death. He might have protected himself easily with all the techniques of fighting he had learned in military school. But he chose to meditate instead. He closed his eyes, and his awareness sank into the silence of the unused lobes of his mind. This phosphorescent scarf floated by:




Dwayne shoved Bunny’s head from behind. He rolled it like a cantaloupe up and down the keys of the piano bar. Dwayne laughed, and he called his son “… a God damn cock-sucking machine!”
Bunny did not resist him, even though Bunny’s face was being mangled horribly. Dwayne hauled his head from the keys, slammed it down again. There was blood on the keys—and spit, and mucus.
Rabo Karabekian and Beatrice Keedsler and Bonnie MacMahon all grabbed Dwayne now, pulled him away from Bunny. This increased Dwayne’s glee. “Never hit a woman, right?” he said to the Creator of the Universe.
He then socked Beatrice Keedsler on the jaw. He punched Bonnie MacMahon in the belly. He honestly believed that they were unfeeling machines.
“All you robots want to know why my wife ate Drāno?” Dwayne asked his thunderstruck audience. “I’ll tell you why: She was that kind of machine!”


There was a map of Dwayne’s rampage in the paper the next morning. The dotted line of his route started in the cocktail lounge, crossed the asphalt to Francine Pefko’s office in his automobile agency, doubled back to the new Holiday Inn again, then crossed Sugar Creek and the Westbound lane of the Interstate to the median divider, which was grass. Dwayne was subdued on the median divider by two State Policemen who happened by.
Here is what Dwayne said to the policemen as they cuffed his hands behind his back: “Thank God you’re here!”


Dwayne didn’t kill anybody on his rampage, but he hurt eleven people so badly they had to go to the hospital. And on the map in the newspaper there was a mark indicating each place where a person had been injured seriously. This was the mark, greatly enlarged:




In the newspaper map of Dwayne’s rampage, there were three such crosses inside the cocktail lounge—for Bunny and Beatrice Keedsler and Bonnie MacMahon.
Then Dwayne ran out onto the asphalt between the Inn and his used car lot. He yelled for Niggers out there, telling them to come at once. “I want to talk to you,” he said.
He was out there all alone. Nobody from the cocktail lounge had followed him yet. Mary Alice Miller’s father, Don Miller, was in his car near Dwayne, waiting for Mary Alice to come back with her crown and scepter, but he never saw anything of the show Dwayne put on. His car had seats whose backs could be made to lie flat. They could be made into beds. Don was lying on his back, with his head well below window level, resting, staring at the ceiling. He was trying to learn French by means of listening to lessons recorded on tape.
“Demain nous allons passer la soirée au cinéma,” said the tape, and Don tried to say it, too. “Nous espérons que notre grand-père vivra encore longtemps,” said the tape. And so on.


Dwayne went on calling for Niggers to come talk to him. He smiled. He thought that the Creator of the Universe had programmed them all to hide, as a joke.
Dwayne glanced around craftily. Then he called out a signal he had used as a child to indicate that a game of hide-and-seek was over, that it was time for children in hiding to go home.
Here is what he called, and the sun was down when he called it: “Olly-olly-ox-in-freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”
The person who answered this incantation was a person who had never played hide-and-seek in his life. It was Wayne Hoobler, who came out from among the used cars quietly. He clasped his hands behind his back and placed his feet apart. He assumed the position known as parade rest. This position was taught to soldiers and prisoners alike—as a way of demonstrating attentiveness, gullibility, respect, and voluntary defenselessness. He was ready for anything, and wouldn’t mind death.
“There you are,” said Dwayne, and his eyes crinkled in bittersweet amusement. He didn’t know who Wayne was. He welcomed him as a typical black robot. Any other black robot would have served as well. And Dwayne again carried on a wry talk with the Creator of the Universe, using a robot as an unfeeling conversation piece. A lot of people in Midland City put useless objects from Hawaii or Mexico or someplace like that on their coffee tables or their livingroom end tables or on what-not shelves—and such an object was called a conversation piece.
Wayne remained at parade rest while Dwayne told of his year as a County Executive for the Boy Scouts of America, when more black young people were brought into scouting than in any previous year. Dwayne told Wayne about his efforts to save the life of a young black man named Payton Brown, who, at the age of fifteen and a half, became the youngest person ever to die in the electric chair at Shepherdstown. Dwayne rambled on about all the black people he had hired when nobody else would hire black people, about how they never seemed to be able to get to work on time. He mentioned a few, too, who had been energetic and punctual, and he winked at Wayne, and he said this: “They were programmed that way.”
He spoke of his wife and son again, acknowledged that white robots were just like black robots, essentially, in that they were programmed to be whatever they were, to do whatever they did.
Dwayne was silent for a moment after that.
Mary Alice Miller’s father was meanwhile continuing to learn conversational French while lying down in his automobile, only a few yards away.
And then Dwayne took a swing at Wayne. He meant to slap him hard with his open hand, but Wayne was very good at ducking. He dropped to his knees as the hand swished through the air where his face had been.
Dwayne laughed. “African dodger!” he said. This had reference to a sort of carnival booth which was popular when Dwayne was a boy. A black man would stick his head through a hole in a piece of canvas at the back of a booth, and people would pay money for the privilege of throwing hard baseballs at his head. If they hit his head, they won a prize.


So Dwayne thought that the Creator of the Universe had invited him to play a game of African dodger now. He became cunning, concealed his violent intentions with apparent boredom. Then he kicked at Wayne very suddenly.
Wayne dodged again, and had to dodge yet again almost instantly, as Dwayne advanced with quick combinations of intended kicks, slaps, and punches. And Wayne vaulted onto the bed of a very unusual truck, which had been built on the chassis of a 1962 Cadillac limousine. It had belonged to the Maritimo Brothers Construction Company.
Wayne’s new elevation gave him a view past Dwayne of both barrels of the Interstate, and of a mile or more of Will Fairchild Memorial Airport, which lay beyond. And it is important to understand at this point that Wayne had never seen an airport before, was unprepared for what could happen to an airport when a plane came in at night.
“That’s all right, that’s all right,” Dwayne assured Wayne. He was being a very good sport. He had no intention of climbing up on truck for another swing at Wayne. He was winded, for one thing. For another, he understood that Wayne was a perfect dodging machine. Only a perfect hitting machine could hit him. “You’re too good for me,” said Dwayne.
So Dwayne backed away some, contented himself with preaching up at Wayne. He spoke about human slavery—not only black slaves, but white slaves, too. Dwayne regarded coal miners and workers on assembly lines and so forth as slaves, no matter what color they were. “I used to think that was such a shame,” he said. “I used to think the electric chair was a shame. I used to think war was a shame—and automobile accidents and cancer,” he said, and so on.
He didn’t think they were shames anymore. “Why should I care what happens to machines?” he said.
Wayne Hoobler’s face had been blank so far, but now it began to bloom with uncontrollable awe. His mouth fell open.
The runway lights of Will Fairchild Memorial Airport had just come on. Those lights looked like miles and miles of bewilderingly beautiful jewelry to Wayne. He was seeing a dream come true on the other side of the Interstate.
The inside of Wayne’s head lit up in recognition of that dream, lit up with an electric sign which gave a childish name to the dream—like this: