Cat's Cradle

Call me Jonah. Or John. It makes no difference. Somebody, or something, has always compelled me to be in certain places at certain times, and my journey began when I set out to write a book called *The Day the World Ended*. It was to be an account of what important Americans did on the day the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. This was the *kan-kan*, the instrument that brought me into my *karass* - one of the teams humanity is organized into, doing God's will without ever knowing it. My first letter was to the youngest child of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the bomb's chief creators.

The son, a midget named Newton, wrote back with a story that had nothing to do with triumph and everything to do with a chilling, personal void. On that fateful day, his father, a man who wasn't interested in people, had tried to play with him for the first and only time. He came out of his study, waving a tangle of string in six-year-old Newt's face. “See? See?” he'd asked, his pores like craters on the moon, his breath smelling of cigar smoke. “Cat's cradle. See where the nice pussycat sleeps?” But when Newt looked at the web of X's between his father's hands, he saw nothing but a meaningless game. He burst into tears and ran. As he told me years later, “No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”

My search for the story of Dr. Hoenikker took me to the ugly, smog-bound city of Ilium, New York, to the Research Laboratory where he had worked. There, his old supervisor, Dr. Asa Breed, told me of Hoenikker's playful, amoral genius. He recounted how a Marine general once hounded the old man to invent something that would do away with mud. Hoenikker, in his whimsical way, theorized about a new kind of crystal, a new way for water to freeze. He called it *ice-nine*. A single seed of it, he mused, could turn any body of water solid, with a melting point of one-hundred-and-thirty degrees. Dr. Breed insisted it was just a mental game, a fancy. “If it fell into the streams, and the rivers, and the oceans,” he snapped when I pressed him, “they'd all freeze! And that would be the end of the world!”

My path, I soon learned, led to a miserable Caribbean island, the Republic of San Lorenzo. There, Dr. Hoenikker's other son, the fugitive Franklin, had become Minister of Science and Progress. I flew there, ostensibly to write a story about a local philanthropist, but truly because I had fallen in love with a photograph of the dictator's adopted daughter, the luminous Mona Aamons Monzano. On the plane, I found myself surrounded by members of my *karass*: a gentle, doomed American ambassador and his wife; a boorish bicycle manufacturer and his wife, a fellow Hoosier who insisted I call her “Mom.” It was a textbook example of what the island's outlawed prophet, Bokonon, calls a *granfalloon* - a false and meaningless association of people.

San Lorenzo was a land of spectacular misery, ruled by a dying dictator named “Papa” Monzano. The people had only one comfort: the forbidden religion of Bokononism, a faith built on harmless lies, or *foma*. Its central belief was one of “dynamic tension” - the idea that for people to be happy, good and evil must be kept in a constant, dramatic struggle. The holy man, Bokonon, lived as an outlaw in the jungle, while the tyrant, “Papa,” ruled from his crumbling castle, forever threatening to capture him and hang him on a great iron hook. But it was all a sacred play, a work of art designed to make life bearable.

Shortly after I arrived, my own destiny, my *zah-mah-ki-bo*, was revealed. Frank Hoenikker, a man terrified of the public, offered me the presidency of San Lorenzo. The only condition was that I marry Mona. It was a *vin-dit*, a personal shove from God. In a cave behind a waterfall, I met Mona. We performed *boko-maru*, the mingling of souls by pressing the soles of our bare feet together. In that moment of profound connection, I agreed to everything. I was to be the next president, and Mona was to be my bride.

The end came on the Day of the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy. The guests were assembled on the castle battlements. “Papa” Monzano, in the final throes of cancer, had taken his own life, touching a splinter of *ice-nine* to his lips. He froze solid as a statue. His doctor, a former SS man from Auschwitz, accidentally contaminated himself while examining the body and crashed to the floor, shattering like a glass sculpture. The secret was out: the Hoenikker children had each inherited a piece of their father's final, terrible gift.

As the San Lorenzan air force began its ceremonial flight, one of the planes faltered and crashed into the cliffside below the castle. The explosion sent a tremor through the ancient stone. A great crack opened in the battlements, and a huge section of the castle, with several guests still on it, slid into the sea. Down it went, and with it went the golden lifeboat that served as “Papa's” bed, and the frozen corpse within. The moment the body touched the water, there was a grand AH-WHOOM, like the soft closing of a door as big as the sky. The sea turned to a solid, blue-white pearl. The sky filled with writhing tornadoes that scoured the world with the frost of *ice-nine*.

Mona and I survived in a forgotten bomb shelter. When we emerged, the world was silent and locked in ice. We found a valley filled with the frozen bodies of thousands of San Lorenzans. A note from Bokonon explained that he had advised them to have the good manners to die. Mona, laughing softly at the simple finality of it all, touched a finger to the ground and then to her lips, and was gone.

Now, I live in a cave with the few other survivors, writing this history. The other day, I saw him. Bokonon was sitting on a rock, barefoot, his feet frosted with *ice-nine*. He was writing the final sentence for *The Books of Bokonon*. He handed it to me. It read: “If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.”